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GALLIPOLI 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



GALLIPOLI 



BY 

JOHN MASEFIELD 

Author of ''The Everlasting Mercy," "The 
Story of a Round House,' ' etc. 



ILLUSTRATED 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1916 

All rights reserved 



.3 



COPYEIGHT, 1916, 

By JOHN MASEFIELD 
Set up and elcctrotyped. Published October, 1916. 



OCT 12 !9!6 

©C1,A446048 



DEDICATED 

WITH DEEP RESPECT AND ADMIRATION TO 

General Sir Ian Hamilton, G.C.B., D.S.O. 

AND 

The Officers and Men under his Command, 
March to October, 1915. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



Map No. I 4 

Map No. 2 38 

A view showing Morte Bay, De Tott's Battery, 

and the Asiatic Coast 46 

A remarkable view of V Beach ...._. 48 

The S. S. River Clyde 52 

Some of the barbed wire entanglements near Sed- 

dul-Bahr 56 

Exercising mules 92 

Anzac from the Sea 116 

View of Anzac, looking towards Suvla . . .134 

Map No. 3 136 

A " long focus " view taken over the top of our 

trenches at Anzac 144 

Australians at work at Anzac two days before the 

evacuation took place 146 

A boatload of British troops leaving the S. S. Nile 

for one of the landing beaches 148 

Inside an Australian trench 162 

An Australian bringing in a wounded comrade to 

hospital 224 



Oliver said ... "I have seen the Saracens: the 
valley and the mountains are covered with them; and 
the lowlands and all the plains; great are the hosts of 
that strange people; we have here a very little com- 



pany." 



Roland answered ..." My heart is the bigger for 
that. Please God and His holiest angels, France shall 
never lose her name through me." 

The Song of Roland. 



GALLIPOLI 

A LITTLE while ago, during a short visit to 
America, I was often questioned about the Dar- 
danelles Campaign. People asked me why 
that attempt had been made, why it had been 
made in that particular manner, why other 
courses had not been taken, why this had been 
done and that either neglected or forgotten, 
and whether a little more persistence, here or 
there, would not have given us the victory. 

These questions were often followed by criti- 
cism of various kinds, some of it plainly sug- 
gested by our enemies, some of it shrewd, and 
some the honest opinion of men and women 
happily ignorant of modern war. I answered 
questions and criticism as best I could, but in 
the next town they were repeated to me, and 
in the town beyond reiterated, until I felt the 
need of a leaflet printed for distribution, giving 

my views of the matter. 

3 



4 Gallipoli 

Later, when there was leisure, I began to con- 
sider the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a trag- 
edy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human ef- 
fort, which came, more than once, very near to 
triumph, achieved the impossible many times, 
and failed, in the end, as many great deeds of 
arms have failed, from something which had 
nothing to do with arms nor with the men who 
bore them. That the effort failed is not against 
it; much that is most splendid in military his- 
tory failed, many great things and noble men 
have failed. To myself, this failure is the sec- 
ond grand event of the war; the first was Bel- 
gium's answer to the German ultimatum. 

The Peninsula of Gallipoli, or Thracian 
Chersonese, from its beginning in the Gulf of 
Xeros to Its extremity at Cape Helles, is a 
tongue of hilly land about fifty-three miles long, 
between the iEgean Sea and the Straits of the 
Dardanelles. At Its northeastern. Gulf of 
Xeros or European end it Is four or five miles 
broad, then a little to the south of the town of 
Bulair, it narrows to three miles, in a contrac- 
tion or neck which was fortified during the 















,. . - . >f^CHANAK ;SULTANIEH) 



'rveden 




-Sy THE 

GALLIPOIil PENINSULA 



SCALE OF MILCS 



The Squares show the areas of the 
larger scale maps m the volume. 



Gallipoli 5 

Crimean War by French and English soldiers. 
This fortification is known as the Lines of Bu- 
lair. Beyond these lines, to the southwest, the 
peninsula broadens in a westward direction, and 
attains its maximum breadth, of about twelve 
miles, some twenty-four miles from Bulair, be- 
tween the two points of Cape Suvla, on the sea, 
and Cape Uzun, within the Straits. Beyond 
this broad part is a second contraction or neck, 
less than five miles across, and beyond this, 
pointing roughly west-southwesterly, is the final 
tongue or finger of the Peninsula, an isosceles 
triangle of land with a base of some seven miles, 
and two sides of thirteen miles each, converging 
in the blunt tip (perhaps a mile and a half 
across) between Cape Helles and Cape Tekke. 
There is no railway within the peninsula, but bad 
roads, possible for wheeled traffic, wind in the 
valleys, skirting the hills and linking up the prin- 
cipal villages. Most of the travelling and com- 
merce of the peninsula Is done by boat, along 
the Straits, between the little port of Maidos, 
near the Narrows, and the town of Gallipoli 
(the chief town) near the Sea of Marmora. 



6 Gallipoli 

From Gallipoli there is a fair road to Bulair 
and beyond. Some twenty other small towns 
or hamlets are scattered here and there in the 
well-watered valleys in the central broad por- 
tion of the Peninsula. The inhabitants are 
mostly small cultivators with olive and currant 
orchards, a few vineyards and patches of beans 
and grains; but not a hundredth part of the 
land is under cultivation. 

The sea shore, like the Straits shore, is 
mainly steep-to, with abrupt sandy cliffs rising 
from the sea to a height of from one hundred 
to three hundred feet. At irregular and rare 
intervals these cliffs are broken by the ravines 
or gullies down which the autumnal and winter 
rains escape; at the sea mouth of these gullies 
are sometimes narrow strips of stony or sandy 
beach. 

Viewed from the sea, the Peninsula is singu- 
larly beautiful. It rises and falls in gentle and 
stately hills between four hundred and eleven 
hundred feet high, the highest being at about 
the centre. In its colour (after the brief 
spring) in its gentle beauty, and the grace and 



Gallipoli 7 

austerity of its line, it resembles those parts of 
Cornwall to the north of Padstow from which 
one can see Brown Willie. Some Irish hills 
recall it. I know no American landscape like 
It. 

In the brief spring the open ground is cov- 
ered with flowers, but there Is not much open 
ground; In the Cape Helles district it is mainly 
poor land growing heather and thyme ; further 
north there is abundant scrub, low shrubs and 
brushwood, from two to four feet high, fre- 
quently very thick. The trees are mostly 
stunted firs, and very numerous in the south, 
where the fighting was, but more frequently 
north of Suvla. In one or two of the villages 
there are fruit trees; on some of the hills there 
are small clumps of pine. Viewed from the 
sea the Peninsula looks waterless and sun-smit- 
ten; the few water-courses are deep ravines 
showing no water. Outwardly, from a dis- 
tance. It is a stately land of beautiful graceful 
hills rolling In suave yet austere lines and cov- 
ered with a fleece of brushwood. In reality 
the suave and graceful hills are exceedingly 



8 Gallipoli 

steep, much broken and roughly Indented with 
gullies, clefts and narrow irregular valleys. 
The soil Is something between a sand and a 
marl, loose and apt to blow about in dry weather 
when not bound down by the roots of brush- 
wood, but sticky when wet. 

Those who look at the southwestern end of 
the Peninsula, between Cape Suvla and Cape 
Helles, will see three heights greater than the 
rolling wold or downland around them. Seven 
miles southeast from Cape Suvla Is the great 
and beautiful peaked hill of Sari Bair, 970 feet 
high, very steep on Its sea side and thickly 
fleeced with scrub. This hill commands the 
landing place at Suvla. Seven miles south 
from Sari Balr Is the long dominating plateau 
of Kilid Bahr, which runs inland from the 
Straits, at heights varying between five and 
seven hundred feet, to within two miles of the 
sea. This plateau commands the Narrows of 
the Hellespont. Five miles further to the 
southwest and less than six miles from Cape 
Helles Is the bare and lonely lump of AchI 
Baba, 590 feet high. This hill commands the 



Gallipoli 9 

landing place at Cape Helles. These hills and 
the ground commanded by them were the 
scenes of some of the noblest heroism which 
ever went far to atone for the infamy of war. 
Here the efforts of our men were made. 

Those who wish to imagine the scenes must 
think of twenty miles of any rough and steep sea 
coast known to them, picturing it as roadless, 
waterless, much broken with gullies, covered 
with scrub, sandy, loose and difficult to walk 
on, and without more than two miles of ac- 
cessible landing throughout its length. Let 
thern picture this familiar twenty miles as domi- 
nated at intervals by three hills bigger than the 
hills about them, the north hill a peak, the cen- 
tre a ridge or plateau, and the south hill a 
lump. Then let them imagine the hills en- 
trenched, the landing mined, the beaches tan- 
gled with barbed wire, ranged by howitzers and 
swept by machine guns, and themselves three 
thousand miles from home, going out before 
dawn, with rifles, packs, and water bottles, to 
pass the mines under shell fire, cut through 



lO Gallipoli 

the wire under machine gun fire, clamber up 
the hills under the fire of all arms, by the glare 
of shell-bursts in the withering and crashing 
tumult of modern war, and then to dig them- 
selves in in a waterless and burning hill while 
a more numerous enemy charge them with the 
bayonet. And let them imagine themselves 
enduring this night after night, day after day, 
without rest or solace, nor respite from the 
peril of death, seeing their friends killed, and 
their position imperilled, getting their food, 
their munitions, even their drink, from the jaws 
of death, and their breath from the taint of 
death, and their brief sleep upon the dust of 
death. Let them imagine themselves driven 
mad by heat and toil and thirst by day, shaken 
by frost at midnight, weakened by disease and 
broken by pestilence, yet rising on the word 
with a shout and going forward to die in exul- 
tation in a cause foredoomed and almost hope- 
less. Only then will they begin, even dimly, to 
understand what our seizing and holding of 
the landings meant. 

All down the southeastern coast of this Pen- 



Gallipoli 1 1 

insula or outlier from Europe Is a channel of 
sea, known, anciently, as the Hellespont, but in 
modern times more generally as the Darda- 
nelles, from old fortifications of that name near 
the southwestern end of the Strait. This chan- 
nel, two or three miles across at its southwest- 
ern end, broadens rapidly to four or five, then 
narrows to two, then, for a short reach, to one 
mile or less, after which (with one more con- 
traction) it maintains a steady breadth of two 
or three miles till it opens Into the great salt 
lake of the Sea of Marmora, and thence by 
another narrow reach Into the Black Sea, or 
Euxine. 

It Is a deep water channel, with from 25 to 
50 fathoms of water In It throughout its length. 
The Gallipoli, or European, shore Is steep-to, 
with a couple of fathoms of water close Inshore, 
save in one or two beaches, where It shoals. 
On the Asian shore, where the ground is lower 
and the coast more shelving, the water is shal- 
lower. A swift current of from two to three 
knots an hour runs always down the channel 
from the Sea of Marmora: and this with a 



1 2 Gallipoli 

southwesterly gale against it makes a nasty 
sea. 

This water of the Hellespont Is the most im- 
portant channel of water in the world. It is 
the one entrance and exit to the Black Sea, the 
mouths of the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and 
Don and the great ports of Constantinople, 
Odessa and Sebastopol. He who controls the 
channel controls those ports, with their wealth 
and their power to affect great conflicts. The 
most famous war of all times was fought not for 
any human Helen but to control that channel. 
Our Dardanelles campaign was undertaken to 
win through it a free passage for the ships of 
the Allied Powers. 

While the war was still young it became nec- 
essary to attempt this passage for five reasons : 
I. To break the link by which Turkey keeps 
her hold as a European Power. 2. To di- 
vert a large part of the Turkish army from op- 
erations against our Russian Allies in the Cau- 
casus and elsewhere. 3. To pass into Russia, 
at a time when her northern ports were closed 
by Ice, the rifles and munitions of war of which 



Gallipoli 13 

her armies were In need. 4. To bring out of 
Southern Russia the great stores of wheat lying 
there waiting shipment. 5. If possible, to pre- 
vent, by a successful deed of arms In the Near 
East, any new alliance against us among the 
Balkan peoples. 

In its simplest form the problem was to 
force a passage through the defended chan- 
nel of the Dardanelles Into the Sea of Mar- 
mora, to attack the capital of Turkey In Eu- 
rope, to win through the Bosphorus Into the 
Black Sea, securing each step in the advance 
against reconquest by the Turks, so that ships 
might pass from the iEgean to the Russian 
ports In the Black Sea, bringing to the Russians 
arms for their unequipped troops and taking 
from them the corn of the harvests of South- 
ern Russia. The main problem was to force 
a passage through the defended channel of the 
Hellespont. 

This passage had been forced In the past by 
a British naval squadron. In February, 1807, 
Sir John Duckworth sailed through with seven 
ships of the line and some smaller vessels, si- 



14 Gallipoli 

lenced the forts at Sestos and Abydos and de- 
stroyed some Turkish ships; and then, fearing 
that the Turks, helped by French engineers, 
would so improve the fortifications that he 
would never be able to get back, he returned. 
On his return, one of his ships, the Endymion 
frigate, 40 guns, received in her hull two stone 
shot each 26 inches in diameter. 

The permanent fortifications guarding the 
Channel were added to and Improved during 
the nineteenth century. At the outbreak of 
the war with Italy, four years ago, they were 
equipped (perhaps by German officers) with 
modern weapons. An attempt made by Ital- 
ian torpedo boats to rush the Straits by night 
was discovered by searchlights and checked by 
a heavy fire from quick-firing and other guns. 
All the torpedo boats engaged In the operations 
were hit and compelled to return. 

When Turkey entered the war against the 
Allied Powers, her officers had every reason 
to expect that the British or French fleets 
would attempt to force the Channel. The mili- 
tary prize, Constantinople and the control of the 



Gallipoli 15 

Black Sea (whether for peace or for offence), 
was too great a temptation to be resisted. 
Helped by their German allies they prepared 
for this attack with skill, knowledge and imagi- 
nation. The Turks had no effective battle 
fleet, as in the sixteenth century, when they 
sought their enemies upon their own coasts; 
and had they had one they could not have 
passed the British fleet blockading the Darda- 
nelles; but they prepared the channel and its 
shores so that no enemy ship might pass to seek 
them. 

More than the two great wars, in South Af- 
rica and Manchuria, the present war has shown : 

(a) that in modern war, defence Is easier 
and less costly in men and munitions, 
however much less decisive, than at- 
tack ; 

(b) that the ancient type of permanent 
fortress, built of steel, concrete and 
heavy masonry is much less easy to 
defend against the fire of heavy mod- 
ern howitzers and high explosives 
than temporary field works, dug into 



1 6 Gallipoli 

the earth and protected by earth and 
sandbags; 

(c) that the fire of modern long range 
guns is wasteful and ineffective un- 
less the object fired at can be accu- 
rately ranged, and the fire controlled 
by officers who can watch the burst- 
ing of the shells on or near the 
target; 

(d) that in restricted waters the fixed or 
floating mine, filled with high explo- 
sive, is a sure defence against enemy 
ships. 

Beginning with proposition (a), the Turks 
argued that (unlike most defences) a defence 
of the passage of the Dardanelles against naval 
attack might well be decisive (i. e., that it 
might well cause the attack to be abandoned or 
even destroy the attacking ships) since ships 
engaged in the attack would be under every dis- 
advantage, since : 

(b) Their guns, however heavy, would not 
be overwhelmingly successful against temporary 
field works and gun emplacements. 



Gallipoli 17 

(c) Their officers, unable in the first place 
to locate the guns hidden on the shore, would be 
unable to observe the effect of their fire, and 
therefore unable to direct It, and this disad- 
vantage would become greater as the ships ad- 
vanced within the channel and became shut in 
by the banks. 

(d) They would be unable to enter the 
channel until the waters had been dragged for 
mines by mine sweepers. The batteries of 
field guns hidden on the coast would perhaps 
be sufficient to stop the progress of the mine 
sweepers. If not, floating mines, alongshore 
torpedo tubes, and the accurately ranged 
and directed fire of heavy howitzers would 
perhaps sink the ships of war as they ad- 
vanced. 

(e) A ship. If damaged, would be five hun- 
dred miles from any friendly dock and seven 
hundred miles from any friendly arsenal. Re- 
plenishments of ammunition, fuel, food and 
water would have to be brought to the attack- 
ing fleet across these distances of sea, past 
many Islands and through one or two channels 



1 8 Gallipoli 

well suited to be the lurking grounds for enemy 
submarines. 

On the other hand, there was the possibility 
that the heavy naval guns would make the field 
works untenable, that observers in aeroplanes 
and seaplanes would locate, range and observe 
the fire upon the hidden batteries, that thus the 
mine sweepers would be able to clear a passage 
up the Straits without undue interruption, and 
complete the task demanded of them without 
military assistance. 

Before operations could be begun by the Al- 
lied fleets it was necessary to secure some har- 
bour, as close as possible to the Straits, to serve 
as what is called an advanced or subsidiary base, 
where large stores of necessaries, such as fuel 
and munitions, could be accum.ulated for future 
use by the ships engaged. 

The port of Mudros, in Lemnos, was se- 
lected as this subsidiary base. This great nat- 
ural harbour, measuring some two by three 
miles across, provides good holding ground in 
from five to seven fathoms of water for half 
the ships in the world. Two islands in the fair- 



Gallipoli 19 

way divide the entrance Into three passages, 
and make It more easy for the naval officers to 
defend the approaches. It Is a safe harbour 
for ocean-going ships In all weathers, but with 
northerly or southerly gales, such as spring up 
very rapidly there In the changeable seasons of 
the year and blow with great violence for some 
hours at a time, the port Is much wind-swept 
and the sea makes it dangerous for boats to 
He alongside ships. Mudros Itself, the town 
from which the port Is named, Is a small col- 
lection of wretched houses Inhabited by Levan- 
tines, who live by fishery, petty commerce, and 
a few olive gardens and vineyards. It has a 
cathedral or largish church, and a small wooden 
pier, without appliances, for the use of the na- 
tive boatmen. The town lies to the east of 
the harbour, on some rising ground or sand 
which stands up a little higher than the sur- 
rounding country. Behind It, rather more than 
a mile away, are barren hills of some 800 or 
900 feet. The port Is ringed in with these 
hills; it looks like a great extinct crater flooded 
by the sea. Over the hills in fair weather the 



20 Gallipoli 

peaks of Samothrace can be seen. When the 
spring flowers have withered the island is of 
the colour of a lion's skin. Its only beauty 
then is that of changing Hght. 

Mudros in itself offered nothing to the Allied 
fleets but a safe anchorage. It could not even 
supply the ships with fresh water, let alone 
meat, bread and vegetables. The island pro- 
duces little for its few inhabitants ; its wealth of 
a few goats, fish, olives and currants could be 
bought up in a week by the crew of one battle- 
ship. Everything necessary for the operations 
had therefore to be brought by sea and stored 
in Mudros till wanted. When this is grasped, 
the difficulties of the undertaking will be un- 
derstood. There was no dock, wharf nor 
crane in Mudros, nor any place in the harbour 
where a dock or wharf could be built without 
an immense labour of dredging. Ships could 
not be repaired nor dry-docked there, nor could 
they discharge and receive heavy stores save 
by their own winches and derricks. Through- 
out the operations, ships had to serve as 
wharves, and ships' derricks as cranes, and 



Gallipoli 21 

goods were shipped, re-shipped and trans- 
shipped by that incessant manual labour which is 
the larger half of war. 

On the 1 8th February and following days, 
the Allied Fleets attacked the forts at the en- 
trance to the Straits and soon silenced them. 
These were old-fashioned stone structures of 
great strength, they were knocked about and 
made untenable by the fire from the ships, but 
not destroyed. After this first easy success 
came delay, for the real obstacles lay within the 
Straits, between Cape Helles and the Narrows. 
Here, at intervals, very skilfully laid, com- 
manded by many guns, ranged to the inch, were 
eight big mine fields, stretching almost across 
the navigable channel in different directions. 
No ships could pass this part of the Straits until 
the mines had been groped for and removed. 
In thick and violent weather, under heavy fire, 
and troubled by the strong current, the mine- 
sweepers began to remove them, helped by the 
guns of the fleet. But the fleet's fire could not 
destroy the mobile field guns and howitzers 
hidden in the gullies and nullahs (invisible from 



22 Gallipoli 

the ships) on the Asian shore and to the east of 
Achi Baba. The Boers, and later, the Japan- 
ese, had shown how difficult it is to locate well- 
concealed guns. Even when sea- and aero- 
planes had seen and signalled the whereabouts 
of the hidden guns, the ships could only fire 
at the flashes and at most hit some of the gun- 
ners; if their fire became too accurate the gun- 
ners would retire to their shelters, or withdraw 
their guns to new hidden emplacements. These 
hidden guns, firing continually upon the mine- 
sweepers, made the clearing of the mine fields 
towards the Narrows a slow and bloody task. 

On the 1 8th March, the ships developed a 
fierce fire upon the shore defences, and in the 
midst of the engagement the Turks floated 
some large mines upon the attacking ships and 
by these means sank three battleships, one 
French, two English, the French ship with all 
her crew. 

Heavy and unsettled weather which made 
mine-sweeping impossible broke off serious op- 
erations for some days. During these days it 
was decided, though with grave misgivings 



Gallipoli 23 

among the counsellors, that an army should be 
landed on the Peninsula to second the next 
naval attack. 

It was now a month since the operations had 
begun, and the original decision, to leave the 
issue solely to the ships, had delayed the con- 
centration of the troops needed for the task. 
The army, under the supreme command of 
General Sir Ian Hamilton, was assembling, but 
not yet concentrated nor on the scene. Some 
of it was in Egypt, some in transports at sea. 
When it was decided to use the army in the 
venture, much necessary work had still to be 
done. The Turks had now been given so much 
time to defend the landing places that to get 
our troops ashore at all called for the most 
elaborate preparation and the working out of 
careful schemes with the naval officers. The 
Germans boasted that our troops would never 
be able to land; possibly at first thought, many 
soldiers would have agreed with them, but Eng- 
lish soldiers and sailors are not Germans; they 
are, as Carlyle says, *' far other''; our Ad- 
mirals and General felt that with courage and a 



24 Gallipoli 

brave face our troops could land. It was true 
that the well-armed Turks were amply ready 
and could easily concentrate against any army 
which we could land and supply, a far larger 
force, more easily supplied and supported. 
But In the narrow Peninsula they could not 
move their larger forces so as to out-flank us. 
Our flanks could be protected always by the 
fleet. And besides, In war, fortune plays a 
large part, and skill, courage and resolution, 
and that fine blending of all three In the unconi- 
mon sense called genius, have often triumphed 
even where common sense has failed. It was 
necessary that we should divert large armies 
of Turks from our Russian Allies In the Cau- 
casus; It was desirable to strike the Imaginations 
of the Balkan States by some daring feat of 
arms close to them; It was vital to our enter- 
prise In Mesopotamia and to the safety of 
Egypt that we should alarm the Turks for their 
capital and make them withdraw their armies 
from their frontiers. This operation, striking 
at the heart of the Turkish Empire, was the 
readiest way to do all these things. 



Gallipoli 25 

The army designated for this honourable 
and dangerous task consisted of the follow- 
ing: 

A division of French soldiers, the Corps Ex- 
peditionnaire de I'Orlent, under M. le General 
d'Amade. This division was made up of 
French Territorial soldiers and Senegalese. 

The 29th Division of British regular 
troops. 

The Royal Naval Division. 

The Australian and New Zealand Army 
Corps. 

The French Division and the 29th Division 
of British Regular soldiers were men who had 
been fully trained in time of peace, but the 
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and 
the Royal Naval Division, who together made 
up more than half the army, were almost all 
men who had enlisted since the declaration of 
war, and had had not more than six months' ac- 
tive training. They were, however, the finest 
body of young men ever brought together in 
modern times. For physical beauty and nobil- 
ity of bearing they surpassed any men I have 



26 Gallipoli 

ever seen; they walked and looked like the 
kings in old poems, and reminded me of the line 
in Shakespeare: 

" Baited like eagles having lately bathed." 

As their officers put It, " they were in the pink 
of condition and didn't care a damn for any- 
body." Most of these new and Irregular for- 
mations were going into action for the first 
time, to receive their baptism of fire In " a feat 
of arms only possible to the flower of a very 
fine army." 

Having decided to use the army, the ques- 
tion how to use It was left to the Commanding 
General, whose task was to help the British 
fleet through the Narrows. Those who have 
criticised the operations to me, even those who 
know, or pretended to know the country and 
military matters (but who were, for the most 
part, the gulls or agents of German propa- 
ganda) raised, nearly always, one or both of the 
following alternatives to the attack used by Sir 
Ian Hamilton. They have asked : 



Gallipoli 27 

( 1 ) Why did he not attack at or to the north 
of Bulair In the Gulf of Xeros, or 

(2) Why did he not attack along the Asiatic 
coast, Instead of where he did, at Cape 
Helles and Anzac? 

Those who have asked these questions have 
always insisted to me that had he chosen either 
alternative his efforts must have been successful. 
It may be well to set down here the final and 
sufficient reasons against either folly. 

Firstly, then, the reasons against landing the 
army at or to the north of Bulair in the Gulf 
of Xeros. 

I. The task demanded of the army was, to 
second the naval attack in the Straits, I. e., by 
seizing and occupying, if possible, the high 
ground In the Peninsula from which the Turkish 
guns molested the mine-sweepers. As this high 
ground commanded the Asiatic shore, its occu- 
pation by the British troops would have made 
possible the passage of the Straits. This and 
this alone was the task demanded of the army, 
no adventure upon Constantinople was de- 
signed or possible with the numbers of men 



28 Gallipoli 

available. How the army could have sec- 
onded the naval attack by landing three or four 
days' march from the Narrows within easy 
reach of the large Turkish armies in European 
Turkey is not clear. 

Nevertheless, our task was to land the army 
and all landing places had to be examined. 
Pass now to : 

(a) Bulair was carefully reconnoitred and 
found to be a natural stronghold, so fortified 
with earthworks that there was no chance of 
taking it. Ten thousand Turks had been dig- 
ging there for a month, and had made it im- 
pregnable. There are only two landing places 
near Bulair, one (a very bad one) In a swamp 
or salt-marsh to the east, the other in a kind of 
death-trap ravine to the west, both dominated 
by high ground in front, and one (the east- 
ward) commanded also from the rear. Had 
the army, or any large part of it, landed at 
either beach, it would have been decimated in 
the act and then held up by the fortress. 

(b) Had the army landed to the north of 
Bulair on the coast of European Turkey it 



Gallipoli 29 

would have been in grave danger of destruc- 
tion. Large Turkish armies could have 
marched upon its left and front from Adrian- 
ople and Rodosto, while, as it advanced, the 
large army in Gallipoli, reinforced from Asia 
across the Straits, could have marched from 
Bulair and fallen upon its right flank and rear, 
(c) But even had it beaten these armies, 
some four times its own strength, it would none 
the less have perished, through failure of sup- 
plies, since no European army could hope to 
live upon a Turkish province in the spring, and 
European supplies could have been brought to 
it only with the utmost difficulty and danger. 
There is no port upon that part of the Turkish 
coast; no shelter from the violent southerly 
gales, and no depth of water near the shore. 
In consequence, no transports of any size could 
approach within some miles of the coast to land 
either troops or stores. Even had there been 
depth of water for them, transports could not 
have discharged upon the coast because of the 
danger from submarines. They would have 
been compelled to discharge in the safe har- 



.30 Gallipoli 

bour of the subsidiary base at Mudros in Lem- 
nos, and (as happened with the fighting where 
it was) their freight, whether men or stores, 
re-shipped into small ships of too light draught 
to be in danger from submarines, and by them 
conveyed to the landing places. But this sys- 
tem, which never quite failed at Anzac and 
Cape Helles, would have failed on the Xeros 
coast. Anzac is some forty miles from Mud- 
ros, the Xeros coast is eighty, or twice the dis- 
tance. Had the army landed at Xeros, It 
would have been upon an unproductive enemy 
territory in an unsettled season of the year, 
from eighty to twenty hours' steam from their 
own safe subsidiary base. A stormy week 
might have cut them off at any time from all 
possibility of obtaining a man, a biscuit, a cart- 
ridge or even a drink of water, and this upon 
ground where they could with little trouble be 
outnumbered by armies four times their 
strength with sound communications. 

Secondly, for the reasons against attacking 
along the Asiatic coast: 

(a) The coast Is commanded from the Gal- 



Gallipoli 31 

lipoll coast and therefore less important to 
those trying to second a naval attack upon the 
Narrows. 

(b) An army advancing from Kum Kale 
along the Asiatic shore would be forced to 
draw its suppHes from overseas. As it ad- 
vanced, its communications could be cut with 
great ease at any point by the hordes of armed 
Turks in Asia Minor. 

(c) The Turkish armies in Asia Minor 
would have attacked it in the right and rear, 
those from Bulair and Rodosto would have 
ferried over and attacked it in front, the guns 
in Gallipoli would have shelled its left, and the 
task made impracticable. 

Some of those who raised these alternatives 
raised a third; when the first two had been dis- 
posed of, they asked, *' Even if the army 
could not have landed at Bulair or on the Asian 
coast, why did it land where it did land, on 
those suicidal beaches?" The answer to this 
criticism is as follows: It landed on those 
beaches because there were no others on the 



32 Gain poll 

Peninsula, because the only landing places at 
which troops could be got ashore with any pros* 
pect of success however slight were just those 
three or four small beaches near Cape Helles, at 
the southwest end of the Peninsula, and the 
one rather longer beach to the north of Gaba 
or Kaba Tepe. All these beaches were seen to 
be strongly defended, with barbed wire en- 
tanglements on the shore and under the water, 
with sea and land mines, with strongly en- 
trenched riflemen, many machine guns, and an 
ample artillery. In addition, the beaches close 
to Cape Helles were within range of big guns 
mounted near Troy on the Asian shore, and the 
beach near Gaba Tepe was ranged by the guns 
in the olive groves to the south and on the 
hills to the north of it. A strong Turkish army 
held the Peninsula, and very powerful reserves 
were at Bulair, all well supplied (chiefly by 
boat from the Asian shore) with food and 
munitions. German officers had organised the 
defence of the Peninsula with great professional 
skill. They had made it a fortress of great 
strength, differing from all other fortresses in 



Gallipoli 33 

this, that besides being almost impregnable it 
was almost unapproachable. But our army had 
its task to do, there was no other means of do- 
ing it, and our men had to do what they could. 
Any one trying to land, to besiege that fortress, 
had to do so by boat or lighter under every gun 
in the Turkish army. The Turks and the Ger- 
mans knew, better than we, what few and nar- 
row landing places were possible to our men, 
they had more than two months of time in which 
to make those landing places fatal to any enemy 
within a mile of them, yet our men came from 
three thousand miles away, passed that mile of 
massacre, landed and held on with all their 
guns, stores, animals and appliances, in spite of 
the Turk and his ally, who outnumbered them 
at every point. 

No army in history has made a more heroic 
attack; no army in history has been set such 
a task. No other body of men in any modern 
war has been called upon to land over mined 
and wired waters under the cross fire of ma- 
chine guns. The Japanese at Chinampo and 
Chemulpho were not opposed, the Russians at 



34 Gallipoli 

Pitezwo were not prepared, the Spaniards at 
Daiquiri made no fight. Our men achieved a 
feat without parallel in war and no other 
troops In the world (not even Japanese or 
Gurkhas or Ghazis In the hope of heaven) 
would have made good those beaches on the 
25th of April. 



II 



Then said Roland: "Oliver, companion, brother 
... we shall have a strong and tough battle, such as 
man never saw fought. But I shall strike with my 
sword, and you, comrade, will strike with yours; we 
have borne our swords in so many lands, we have ended 
so many battles with them, that no evil song shall be 
sung of them." ... At these words the Franks went 
forward gladly. 

The Song of Roland. 



Let the reader now try to imagine the na- 
ture of the landing. In order to puzzle the 
Turkish commander, to make him hesitate and 
divide his forces, it was necessary to land or 
pretend to land. In some force, simultaneously 
at various places. A feint of landing was to 
be made near Bulair, the French Corps Expe- 
ditlonnaire was to land at Kum Kale, to attack 
and silence the Asiatic fortifications and batter- 
ies, the ' Australian and New Zealand Army 
Corps was to land at or near Gaba Tepe, while 
men of the 29th and Royal Naval Divisions 
landed at or near Cape Helles, some towards 
Krithia on the north, others nearer Sedd-el- 
Bahr on the southwest and south. The main 
attacks were to be those near Gaba Tepe and 
Cape Helles. 

At Cape Helles three principal landings were 
to be made at the following places : 

I. At Beach V, a small semi-circular sandy 
37 



38 Gallipoli 

bay, 300 yards across, just west of the ruins 
of Sedd-el-Bahr castle. The ground rises 
steeply round the half circle of the bay exactly 
as the seats rise in an amphitheatre. Modern 
defence could not ask for a more perfect site. 

2. At Beach W (to the west of V), where 
a small sandy bay under Cape Tekke offered 
a landing upon a strip of sand about the size 
of Beach V. The slope upward from this 
beach is more gentle than at V, through a suc- 
cession of sand dunes, above which the ground 
was strongly entrenched. The cliffs north and 
south are precipitous, and make the beach a 
kind of gully or ravine. The Turks had placed 
machine guns in holes in the cliff, had wired and 
mined both beach and bay, and thrown up 
strong redoubts to flank them. Beach W was 
a death trap. 

3. At Beach X (north of W, on the other 
or northern side of Cape Tekke), a narrow 
strip of sand, 200 yards long, at the foot of a 
low cHff. This, though too small to serve for 
the quick passage ashore of many men at a 
time, was a slightly easier landing place than 




Aan/irdi Gtog^&tailLendont^ 



Map No. 2 



Gallipoli 39 

the other two, owing to the lie of the ground. 
Besides these main landings, two minor 
landings were to be made as follows: 

4. At Beach S, a small beach, within the 
Straits, beyond Sedd-el-Bahr. 

5. At Beach Y (on the i^gcan, to the west 
of Krithia), a strip of sand below a precipitous 
cliff, gashed with steep, crumbling, and scrub- 
covered gullies. 

These two minor landings were to protect the 
flanks of the main landing parties, " to dissemi- 
nate the forces of the enemy and to interrupt 
the arrival of his reinforcements." They were 
to take place at dawn (at about 5 a. m. or half 
an hour before the main attacks), without any 
preliminary bombardment from the fleet upon 
the landing places. 

Near Gaba Tepe only one landing was to 
be made, upon a small beach, 200 yards across, 
a mile to the north of Gaba Tepe promontory. 
The ground beyond this beach is abrupt sandy 
cliff, covered with scrub, flanked by Gaba Tepe, 
and commanded by the land to shoreward. 



40 GaUipoli 

For some days before the landing, the Army 
lay at Mudros, in Lemnos, aboard its trans- 
ports, or engaged in tactical exercises ashore 
and in the harbour. Much bitter and ignorant 
criticism has been passed upon this delay, which 
was, unfortunately, very necessary. The 
month of April, 19 15, in the i^gean, was a 
month of unusually unsettled weather; it was 
quite impossible to attempt the landing with- 
out calm water and the likelihood of fine 
weather for some days. In rough weather it 
would have been impossible to land laden sol- 
diers with their stores through the surf of open 
beaches, under heavy fire, and those who main- 
tain, that "other soldiers" (i. e. them.selves) 
would have made the attempt, can have no 
knowledge of what wading ashore from a boat, 
in bad weather, in the ^Egean or any other sea, 
even without a pack and with no enemy ahead, is 
Hke. But in unsettled weather the Gallipoli 
coast is not only difficult but exceedingly danger- 
ous for small vessels. The currents are fierce, 
and a short and ugly sea gets up quickly and 
makes towing hazardous. Had the attempt 



Gallipoli 41 

been made In foul weather a great many men 
would have been drowned, some few would have 
reached the shore, and then the ships would 
have been forced off the coast. The few men 
left on the shore would have had to fight there 
with neither supplies nor supports till the enemy 
overwhelmed them. 

Another reason for delay was the need for 
the most minute preparation. Many armies 
have been landed from boats from the time of 
Pharaoh's Invasion of Punt until the present, 
but no men, not even Caesar's army of Invasion 
In Britain, have had to land In an enemy's coun- 
try with such a prospect of difficulty before 
them. They were going to land on a food- 
less cliff, five hundred miles from a store, in 
a place and at a season In which the sea's ris- 
ing might cut them from supply. They had to 
take with them all things, munitions, guns, en- 
trenching tools, sandbags, provisions, clothing, 
medical stores, hospital equipment, mules, 
horses, fodder, even water to drink, for the 
land produced not even that. These military 
supplies had to be arranged In boats and 



42 GalUpoli 

lighters In such a way that they might be thrust 
ashore with many thousands of men In all haste 
but without confusion. All this world of 
preparation, which made each unit landed a 
self-supporting army, took time and labour, 
how much can only be judged by those who 
have done similar work. 

On Friday, the 23rd of April, the weather 
cleared so that the work could be begim. In 
fine weather in Mudros a haze of beauty comes 
upon the hills and water till their loveliness 
is unearthly it is so rare. Then the bay is 
like a blue jewel, and the hills lose their sav- 
agery, and glow, and are gentle, and the sun 
comes up from Troy, and the peaks of Sa- 
mothrace change colour, and all the marvellous 
ships in the harbour are transfigured. The 
land of Lemnos was beautiful with flowers at 
that season, in the brief iEgean spring, and 
to seawards always, in the bay, were the ships, 
more ships, perhaps, than any port of modern 
times has known; they seemed like half the 
ships of the world. In this crowd of ship- 
ping, strange beautiful Greek vessels passed, 



GalUpoli 43 

under rigs of old time, with sheep and goats 
and fish, for sale, and the tugs of the [Thames 
and Mersey met again the ships they had towed 
of old, bearing a new freight, of human cour- 
age. The transports (all painted black) lay 
In tiers, well within the harbour, the men of 
war nearer Mudros and the entrance. Now in 
all that city of ships, so busy with passing picket- 
boats, and noisy with the labour of men, the 
getting of the anchors began. Ship after ship, 
crammed with soldiers, moved slowly out of 
harbour, in the lovely day, and felt again the 
heave of the sea. No such gathering of fine 
ships has ever been seen upon this earth, and 
the beauty and the exaltation of the youth 
upon them made them like sacred things as 
they moved away. All the thousands of men 
aboard them, gathered on deck to see, till each 
rail was thronged. These men had come from 
all parts of the British world, from Africa, 
Austraha, Canada, India, the Mother Coun- 
try, New Zealand and remote islands in the 
sea. They had said good-bye to home that 
they might offer their lives in the cause we 



44 Gallipoli 

stand for. In a few hours at most, as they 
well knew, perhaps a tenth of them would have 
looked their last on the sun, and be a part of 
foreign earth or dumb things that the tides 
push. Many of them would have disappeared 
forever from the knowledge of man, blotted 
from the book of life none would know how, 
by a fall or chance shot in the darkness, in 
the blast of a shell, or alone, like a hurt beast, 
In some scrub or gully, far from comrades and 
the English speech and the English singing. 
And perhaps a third of them would be mangled, 
blinded or broken, lamed, made imbecile or dis- 
figured, with the colour and the taste of life 
taken from them, so that they would never 
more move with comrades nor exult in the sun. 
And those not taken thus would be under the 
ground, sweating in the trench, carrying sand- 
bags up the sap, dodging death and danger, 
without rest or food or drink, in the blazing 
sun or the frost of the Gallipoli night, till 
death seemed relaxation and a wound a lux- 
ury. But as they moved out these things were 
but the end they asked, the reward they had 



Gallipoli 45 

come for, the unseen cross upon the breast. 
All that they felt was a gladness of exultation 
that their young courage was to be used. They 
went like kings in a pageant to the imminent 
death. 

As they passed from moorings to the man- 
of-war anchorage on their way to the sea, 
their feeling that they had done with life and 
were going out to something new, welled up 
in those battalions; they cheered and cheered 
till the harbour rang with cheering. As each 
ship crammed with soldiers drew near the bat- 
tleships, the men swung their caps and cheered 
again, and the sailors answered, and the noise 
of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships 
not yet moving joined In, and the men ashore, 
till all the life In the harbour was giving 
thanks that It could go to death rejoicing. All 
was beautiful In that gladness of men about to 
die, but the most moving thing was the great- 
ness of their generous hearts. As they passed 
the French ships, the memory of old quarrels 
healed, and the sense of what sacred France 
has done and endured. In this great war, and 



46 Gallipoli 

the pride of having such men as the French for 
comrades, rose up in their warm souls, and 
they cheered the French ships more, even, than 
their own. 

They left the harbour very, very slowly; this 
tumult of cheering lasted a long time; no one 
who heard it will ever forget it, or think of it 
unshaken. It broke the hearts of all there 
with pity and pride: it went beyond the guard 
of the English heart. Presently all were out, 
and the fleet stood across for Tenedos, and the 
sun went down with marvellous colour, light- 
ing island after island and the Asian peaks, 
and those left behind in Mudros trimmed their 
lamps knowing that they had been for a little 
brought near to the heart of things. 

The next day, the 24th April, the troops of 
the landing parties went on board the war- 
ships and mine-sweepers which were to take 
them ashore. At midnight the fleet got under 
way from Tenedos and stood out for the Pen- 
insula. Dawn was to be at five, the landings 
on the flanks were to take place then, the others 







o 

bX) 

c 

o 



Gallipoli 47 

at half-past Rve^ after the fleet had bombarded 
the beaches. Very few of the soldiers of the 
landing parties slept that night; the excitement 
of the morrow kept them awake, as happened 
to Nelson's sailors before Trafalgar. It was 
a very still fine night, slightly hazy, with a sea 
so still that the ships had no trouble with their 
long tows of boats and launches. As it began 
to grow light the men went down into the boats, 
and the two flanking parties started for the 
Outer beaches S and Y. The guns of the fleet 
now opened a heavy fire upon the Turkish posi- 
tions and the big guns on the Asian shore sent 
over a few shell in answer; but the Turks near 
the landing places reserved their fire. During 
the Intense bombardment by the fleet, when the 
ships were trembling like animals with the 
blasts of the explosions, the picket boats tow- 
ing the lighters went ahead and the tow-loads 
of crowded men started for the main landings 
on beaches V, W and X. 

It was now light, and the haze on Sedd-el- 
Bahr was clearing away so that those in charge 
of the boats could see what they were doing. 



48 Gallipoli 

Had they attempted an attack in the dark on 
those unsurveyed beaches among the fierce and 
dangerous tide rips the loss of life would have 
been very great. As it was, the exceeding 
fierceness of the currents added much to the 
difficulty and danger of the task. We will take 
the landings In succession. 

The Landing at V Beachy near Sedd-el-Bahr. 

The men told off for this landing were: 
The Dublin Fusiliers, the Munster FusIHers, 
half a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment, 
and the West Riding Field Company. 

Three companies of the Dublin Fusiliers 
were to land from towed lighters, the rest of 
the party from a tramp steamer, the collier 
River Clyde. This ship, a conspicuous sea- 
mark at Cape Helles throughout the rest of the 
campaign, had been altered to carry and land 
troops. Great gangways or entry ports had 
been cut In her sides on the level of her be- 
tween decks, and platforms had been built out 
upon her sides below these, so that men might 
run from her in a hurry. The plan was to 







: ^ 



u 
PQ 



Gallipoli 49 

beach her as near the shore as possible, and 
then drag or sweep the hghters, which she 
towed, Into position between her and the shore, 
so as to make a kind of boat bridge from her to 
the beach. When the lighters were so moored 
as to make this bridge, the entry ports were 
to be opened, the waiting troops were to rush 
out on to the external platforms, run from 
them on to the lighters and so to the shore. 
The ship's upper deck and bridge were pro- 
tected with boiler plate and sandbags, and a 
casement for machine guns was built upon her 
fo'c'sle, so that she might reply to the enemy's 
fire. 

Five picket-boats, each towing five boats or 
launches full of men, steamed alongside the 
River Clyde and went ahead when she 
grounded. She took the ground rather to the 
right of the little beach, some 400 yards from 
the ruins of Sedd-el-Bahr castle, before the 
Turks had opened fire, but almost as she 
grounded, when the picket-boats with their 
tows were ahead of her, only twenty or thirty 
yards from the beach, every rifle and machine 



50 Gallipoli 

gun in the castle, the town above it, and in 
the curved low strongly trenched hill along the 
bay, began a murderous fire upon ship and 
boats. There was no question of their miss- 
ing. They had their target on the front and 
both flanks at ranges between loo and 300 
yards in clear daylight, thirty boats bunched 
together and crammed with men and a good 
big ship. The first outbreak of fire made the 
bay as white as a rapid, for the Turks fired not 
less than ten thousand shots a minute for the 
first few minutes of that attack. Those not 
killed In the boats at the first discharge jumped 
overboard to wade or swim ashore, many were 
killed in the water, many, who were wounded, 
were swept away and drowned, others, trying 
to swim In the fierce current, were drowned by 
the weight of their equipment; but some 
reached the shore, and these instantly doubled 
out to cut the wire entanglements, and were 
killed, or dashed for the cover of a bank of 
sand or raised beach which runs along the 
curve of the bay. Those very few who reached 
this cover were out of immediate danger, but 



Gallipoli 5 1 

they were only a handful. The boats were de- 
stroyed where they grounded. 

Meanwhile, the men of the River Clyde 
tried to make their bridge of boats, by sweep- 
ing the lighters Into position and mooring 
them between the ship and the shore. They 
were killed as they worked, but others took 
their places, the bridge was made, and some 
of the Munsters dashed along it from the ship 
and fell In heaps as they ran. As a second 
company followed, the moorings of the light- 
ers broke or were shot, the men leaped Into 
the water and were drowned or killed, or 
reached the beach and were killed, or fell 
wounded there, and lay under fire getting 
wound after wound till they died; very, very 
few reached the sandbank. More brave men 
jumped aboard the lighters to remake the 
bridge. They were swept away or shot to 
pieces; the average life on those boats was some 
three minutes long, but they remade the bridge, 
and the third company of the Munsters doubled 
down to death along It under a storm of shrap- 
nel which scarcely a man survived. [The big 



52 Gallipoli 

guns in Asia were now shelling the River 
Clyde, and the hell of rapid fire never paused. 
More men tried to land, headed by Brigadier 
General Napier, who was instantly killed, with 
nearly all his followers. Then for long hours 
the remainder stayed on board, down below in 
the grounded steamer, while the shots beat on 
her plates with a rattling clang which never 
stopped. Her twelve machine guns fired back, 
killing any Turk who showed, but nothing could 
be done to support the few survivors of the 
landing, who now lay under cover of the sand- 
bank on the other side of the beach. It was al- 
most certain death to try to leave the ship, but 
all through the day men leaped from her (with 
leave or without it) to bring water or succour to 
the wounded on the boats or beach. A hun- 
dred brave men gave their lives thus: every 
man there earned the Cross that day: a boy 
earned it by one of the bravest deeds of the war, 
leaping into the sea with a rope in his teeth to 
try to secure a drifting lighter. 

The day passed thus, but at nightfall the 
Turks' fire paused, and the men came ashore 



Gain poll ' 53 

from the River Clyde, almost unharmed. They 
joined the survivors on the beach and at once 
attacked the old fort and the village above It. 
tThese works were strongly held by the enemy. 
All had been ruined by the fire from the fleet, 
but in the rubble and ruin of old masonry 
there were thousands of hidden riflemen backed 
by machine guns. Again and again they beat 
off our attacks, for there was a bright moon 
and they knew the ground, and our men had 
to attack uphill over wire and broken earth 
and heaped stones in all the wreck and con- 
fusion and strangeness of war at night In a 
new place. Some of the Dubllns and Munsters 
went astray in the ruins, and were wounded 
far from their fellows and so lost. The Turks 
became more daring after dark; while the light 
lasted they were checked by the River Clyde's 
machine guns, but at midnight they gathered 
unobserved and charged. They came right 
down onto the beach, and in the darkness and 
moonlight much terrible and confused fighting 
followed. Many were bayoneted, many shot, 
there was wild firing and crying, and then the 



54 Gallipoli 

Turk attack melted away, and their machine 
guns began again. When day dawned, the sur- 
vivors of the landing party were crouched 
under the shelter of the sandbank; they had 
had no rest; most of them had been fighting all 
night, all had landed across the corpses of their 
friends. No retreat was possible, nor was it 
dreamed of, but to stay there was hopeless. 
Lieutenant Colonel Doughty-Wylie gathered 
them together for an attack: the fleet opened a 
terrific fire upon the ruins of the fort and vil- 
lage, and the landing party went forward again, 
fighting from bush to bush and from stone to 
stone, till the ruins were in their hands. Shells 
still fell among them, single Turks, lurking un- 
der cover, sniped them and shot them, but the 
landing had been made good, and V beach was% 
secured to us. 

This was the worst and the bloodiest of all 
the landings. 

The Landing at W Beach, under Cape Tekke, 
The men told off for this landing were the 
1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, supported 
(later) by the Worcester Regiment. 



Gallipoli 55 

The men were landed at six in the morning 
from ships' boats run ashore by picket boats. 
On landing, they rushed the wire entanglements, 
broke through them, with heavy loss, and won 
to the dead ground under the cliffs. The ships 
drew nearer to the beach and opened heavy 
fire upon the Turks, and the landing party 
stormed the cliffs and won the trenches. 

The Worcester Regiment having landed, at- 
tempts were made to break a way to the right, 
so as to join hands with the men on V Beach. 
All the land between the two beaches was 
heavily wired and so broken that it gave much 
cover to the enemy. Many brave Worcesters 
went out to cut the wires and were killed; the 
fire was intense, there was no getting further. 
The trenches already won were secured and 
improved, the few available reserves were hur- 
ried up, and by dark, when the Turks attacked, 
again and again, in great force, our men were 
able to beat them off, and hold on to what they 
had won. 



56 Gallipoli 

The Landing at X Beach (Sometimes called Im- 
placable Landing), towards Krithia. 

The men told off for this landing were the 
1st Royal Fusiliers, with a working party of 
the Anson BattaHon, R. N. D. 

These men were towed ashore from H. M. S. 
Implacable about an hour after dawn. The 
ship stood close in to the beach and opened 
rapid fire on the enemy trenches: under cover 
of this fire the men got ashore fairly easily. 
On moving inland they were attacked by a great 
force of Turks and checked; but they made 
good the ground won, and opened up communi- 
cations with the Lancashires who had landed 
at W Beach. This landing was the least 
bloody of all. 

Of the two flank landings, that on the right, 
within the Straits, to the right of Sedd-el-Bahr, 
got ashore without great loss and held on; 
that on the left, to the left of X Beach, got 
ashore, fought a desperate and bloody battle 
against five times Its strength, and finally had to 
re-embark. The men got ashore upon a cliff 




m 



Gallipoli 57 

so steep that the Turks had not troubled to 
defend it, but on landing they were unable to 
link up with the men on X Beach as had been 
planned. They were attacked in great force 
by an ever-growing Turkish army, fought all 
day and all through the night in such trenches 
as they had been able to dig under fire, and at 
last in the morning of the next day went down 
the cliffs and re-embarked, most nobly covered 
to the en Jby a party from the King's Own Scot- 
tish Borderers and the Plymouth Battalion. 

During the forenoon of the 25th, a regiment 
of the French Corps landed at Kum Kale, un- 
der cover of the guns of the French warships, 
and engaged the enemy throughout the day 
and night. Their progress was held up by a 
strongly entrenched force during the afternoon, 
and after sharp fighting all through the night 
they re-embarked in the forenoon of the 26th 
with some 400 Turkish prisoners. This land- 
ing of the French diverted from us on the 25th 
the fire of the howitzers emplaced on the Asi- 
atic shore. Had these been free to fire upon 
us, the landings near Sedd-el-Bahr would have 



58 Gallipoli 

been made even more hazardous than they 
were. 

At Bulair one man, Lieutenant Freyberg, 
swam ashore from a Destroyer, towing a little 
raft of flares. Near the shore he lit two of 
these flares, then, wading onto the land, he lit 
others at intervals along the coast, then he wan- 
dered inland, naked, on a personal reconnais- 
sance, and soon found a large Turkish army 
strongly entrenched. Modesty forbade further 
intrusion. He went back to the beach and 
swam off to his Destroyer, could not find her in 
the dark, and swam for several miles, was ex- 
hausted and cramped, and was at last picked 
up, nearly dead. This magnificent act of cour- 
age and endurance, done by one unarmed man, 
kept a large Turkish army at Bulair during the 
critical hours of the landing. " The Constan- 
tinople papers were filled with accounts of the 
repulse of the great attack at Bulair." The 
flares deceived the Turks even more completely 
than had been hoped. 

While these operations were securing our 
hold upon the extreme end of the Peninsula, 



GaUipoli 59 

the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps 
were making good their landing on the iEgean 
coast, to the north of Gaba Tepe. They sailed 
from Mudros on the 24th, arrived off the coast 
of the Peninsula at about half-past one on the 
morning of the 25th, and there under a setting 
moon, in calm weather, they went on board the 
boats which were to take them ashore. At 
about half-past three the tows left the ships 
and proceeded in darkness to the coast. 

Gaba or Kaba Tepe is a steep cliff or prom- 
ontory about 70 feet high with a whitish nose 
and something the look of a blunt-nosed tor- 
pedo or porpoise. It is a forbidding-looking 
snout of land, covered with scrub where it is 
not too steep for roots to hold, and washed by 
deep water. About a mile to the north of it 
there is a possible landing place, and north of 
that again a long and narrow strip of beach 
between two little headlands. This latter 
beach cannot be seen from Gaba Tepe. The 
ground above these beaches is exceedingly steep 
sandy cliff, broken by two great gulleys or ra- 
vines, which run inland. All the ground, ex* 



6o Gallipoli 

cept in one patch In the southern ravine, where 
there Is a sort of meadow of grass, is densely 
covered with scrub, mostly between two and 
three feet high. Inland from the beach, the 
land of the Peninsula rises in steep, broken hills 
and spurs, with clumps of pine upon them, and 
dense undergrowths of scrub. The men se- 
lected for this landing were the 3rd Brigade 
of the Australian and New Zealand Army 
Corps, followed and supported by the ist and 
2nd Brigades. 

The place selected for the landing was the 
southern beach and nearer of the two to Gaba 
Tepe. This, like the other landing places near 
Cape Helles, was strongly defended, and most 
difficult of approach. Large forces of Turks 
were entrenched there, well prepared. But in 
the darkness of the early morning after the 
moon had set the tows stood a little further 
to the north than they should have done, per- 
haps because some high ground to their left 
made a convenient steering mark against the 
stars. They headed In towards the northern 
beach between the two little headlands, where 



Gallipoli 6 1 

the Turks were not expecting them. How- 
ever, they were soon seen and very heavy in- 
dependent rifle fire was concentrated on them. 
As they neared the beach " about one battalion 
of Turks " doubled along the land to intercept 
them. These men came from nearer Gaba 
Tepe, firing as they ran, into the mass of the 
boats at short range. A great many men were 
killed in the boats, but the dead men's oars 
were taken by survivors, and the boats forced 
into the shingle. The men jumped out, waded 
ashore, charged the enemy with the bayonet, 
and broke the Turk attack to pieces. The 
Turks scattered and were pursued, and now 
the steep scrub-covered cliffs became the scene 
of the most desperate fighting. 

The scattered Turks dropped into the scrub 
and disappeared. Hidden all over the rough 
cliffs, under every kind of cover, they sniped 
the beach or ambushed the little parties of 
the 3rd Brigade who had rushed the landing. 
All over the broken hills there were isolated 
fights to the death, men falling into gullies and 
being bayoneted, sudden duels, point blank. 



62 Gallipoli 

where men crawling through the scrub met 
each other and life went to the quicker finger, 
heroic deaths, where some half section which 
had lost touch were caught by ten times their 
strength and charged and died. No man of 
our side knew that cracked and fissured jungle. 
Men broke through it on to machine guns, or 
showed up on a crest and were blown to pieces, 
or leaped down from it into some sap or trench, 
to catch the bombs flung at them and hurl them 
at the thrower. Going as they did, up cliffs, 
through scrub, over ground which would have 
broken the alignment of the Tenth Legion, 
they passed many hidden Turks, who were thus 
left to shoot them in the back or to fire down 
at the boats, from perhaps only fifty yards 
away. It was only just light, theirs was the 
first British survey of that wild country; only 
now, as It showed up clear, could they realise 
its difficulty. They pressed on up the hill. 
They dropped and fired and died; they drove 
the Turks back, they flung their packs away, 
wormed through the bush and stalked the snip- 
ers from the flash. As they went, the words 



Gallipoli 63 

of their song supported them, the ribald and 
proud chorus of " Australia will be there," 
which the men on the torpedoed Southland 
sang, as they fell in, expecting death. Pres- 
ently, as it grew lighter, the Turks' big howitz- 
ers began shelling the beach, and their field 
guns, well-hidden, opened on the transports 
now busy disembarking the ist and 2nd Bri- 
gades. They forced the transports to stand 
further out to sea, and shelled the tows, as 
they came in, with shrapnel and high explosive. 
As the boats drew near the shore every gun on 
Gaba Tepe took them in flank and the snipers 
concentrated on them from the shore. More 
and more Turks were coming up at the double 
to stop the attack up the hill. The fighting in 
the scrub grew fiercer; shells burst continually 
upon the beach, boats were sunk, men were 
killed in the water. The boatmen and beach- 
working-parties were the unsung heroes of that 
landing. The boatmen came in with the tows, 
under fire, waited with them under intense and 
concentrated fire of every kind, until they were 
unloaded, and then shoved of!, and put slowly 



64 Gallipoli 

back for more, and then came back again. 
The beach parties were wading to and from 
that shell-smitten beach all day, unloading, 
carrying ashore and sorting the munitions and 
necessaries for many thousands of men. They 
worked in a strip of beach and sea from 500 
yards long by 40 broad, and the fire directed 
on that strip was such that every box brought 
ashore had one or more shells and not less than 
fifty bullets directed at it before it was flung 
upon the sand. More men came in and went 
on up the hill in support; but as yet there were 
no guns ashore, and the Turks' fire became in- 
tenser. By ten o'clock the Turks had had time 
to bring up enough men from their prepared 
positions to hold up the advance. Scattered 
parties of our men who had gone too far in 
the scrub, were cut off and killed, for there was 
no thought of surrender in those marvellous 
young men; they were the flower of this world's 
manhood, and died as they had lived, owning 
no master on this earth. More and more 
Turks came up with big and field artillery, and 
now our attack had to hold on to what it had 



Gallipoli 65 

won, against more than twice its numbers. We 
had won a rough bow of ground, in which the 
beach represented the bow string, the beach 
near Gaba Tepe the south end, and the hovel 
known as Fisherman's Hut the north. Against 
this position, held by at most 8,000 of our men, 
who had had no rest and had fought hard since 
dawn, under every kind of fire in a savage 
rough country unknown to them, came an over- 
whelming army of Turks to drive them into the 
sea. For four hours the Turks attacked and 
again attacked, with a terrific fire of artillery 
and waves of men in succession. They came 
fresh, from superior positions, with many guns, 
to break a disorganised line of breathless men 
not yet dug in. The guns of the ships opened 
on them, and the scattered units in the scrub 
rolled them back again and again by rifle and 
machine gun fire, and by charge after counter- 
charge. More of the Army Corps landed to 
meet the Turks, the fire upon the beach never 
slackened, and they came ashore across corpses 
and wrecked boats and a path like a road in 
hell with ruin and blasts and burning. They 



66 Gallipoli 

went up the cliff to their fellows under an ever- 
growing fire, that lit the scrub and burned the 
wounded and the dead. Darkness came, but 
there was no rest nor lull. Wave after wave 
of Turks came out of the night, crying the 
proclamation of their faith; others stole up in 
the dark through the scrub and shot or stabbed 
and crept back, or were seen and stalked and 
killed. Flares went up, to light with their blue 
and ghastly glare the wild glens peopled by 
the enemy. Men worked at the digging-in till 
they dropped asleep upon the soil, and more 
Turks charged and they woke and fired and 
again dug. It was cruelly cold after the sun 
had gone, but there was no chance of warmth 
or proper food; to dig-in and beat back the 
Turk or die was all that men could think of. 
In the darkness, among the blasts of the shells, 
men scrambled up and down the pathless cliffs 
bringing up tins of water and boxes of cart- 
ridges, hauling up guns and shells, and bring- 
ing down the wounded. The beach was heaped 
with wounded, placed as close under the cliff 
as might be. In such yard or so of dead ground 



Gallipoli ^7 

as the cliffs gave. The doctors worked among 
them and shells fell among them and doctors 
and wounded were blown to pieces, and the sur- 
vivors sang their song of " Australia will be 
there," and cheered the newcomers still land- 
ing on the beach. Sometimes our fire seemed 
to cease and then the Turk shells filled the 
night with their scream and blast and the pat- 
tering of their fragments. With all the fury 
and the crying of the shells, and the shouts and 
cries and cursing on the beach, the rattle of the 
small arms and the cheers and defiance up the 
hill, and the roar of the great guns far away, 
at sea, or in the olive groves, the night seemed 
in travail of a new age. All the blackness was 
shot with little spurts of fire, and streaks of 
fire, and malignant bursts of fire, and arcs and 
glows and crawling snakes of fire, and the moon 
rose, and looked down upon it all. In the 
fiercer hours of that night shells fell in that con- 
tested mile of ground and on the beach beyond 
it at the rate of one a second, and the air whim- 
pered with passing bullets, or fluttered with the 
rush of the big shells, or struck the head of 



68 Gallipoli 

the passer like a moving wall with the shock 
of the explosion. All through the night, the 
Turks attacked, and in the early hours their 
fire of shrapnel became so hellish that the Aus- 
trahans soon had not men enough left to hold 
the line. Orders were given to fall back to a 
shorter line, but in the darkness, uproar and 
confusion, with many sections refusing to fall 
back, others falling back and losing touch, 
others losing their way in gully or precipice, and 
shrapnel hailing on all, as it had hailed for 
hours, the falling back was mistaken by some 
for an order to re-embark. Many men who 
had lost their officers and non-commissioned of- 
ficers fell back to the beach, where the confu- 
sion of wounded men, boxes of stores, field 
dressing stations, corpses and the litter and the 
waste of battle, had already blocked the going. 
The shells bursting in this clutter made the 
beach, in the words of an eye-witness, " like 
bloody hell and nothing else." But at this 
breaking of the wave of victory, this panting 
moment in the race, when some of the runners 
had lost their first wind, encouragement reached 



Gain poll 69 

our men: a message came to the beach from Sir 
Ian Hamilton, to say that help was coming, 
and that an Australian submarine had entered 
the Narrows and had sunk a Turkish transport 
off Chanak. 

This word of victory, coming to men who 
thought for the moment that their efforts had 
been made in vain, had the effect of a fresh bri- 
gade. The men rallied back up the hill; bear- 
ing the news to the firing-line, the new, con- 
stricted line was made good, and the rest of 
the night was never anything but continued vic- 
tory to those weary ones in the scrub. But 
24 hours of continual battle exhausts men, and 
by dawn the Turks, knowing the weariness of 
our men, resolved to beat them down Into the 
sea. When the sun was well In our men's 
eyes they attacked again, with not less than 
twice our entire strength of fresh men, and with 
an overwhelming superiority In field artillery. 
Something in the Turk commander and the 
knowledge that a success there would bring our 
men across the peninsula within a day, made 
the Turks more desperate enemies there than 



70 GallipoU 

elsewhere. They came at us with a determina- 
tion which might have triumphed against other 
troops. As they came on they opened a ter- 
rific fire of shrapnel upon our position, pouring 
in such a hail that months afterwards one could 
see their round shrapnel bullets stuck in bare 
patches of ground, or in earth thrown up from 
the trenches, as thickly as plums in a pudding. 
Their multitudes of men pressed through the 
scrub as skirmishers, and sniped at every mov- 
ing thing; for they were on higher ground and 
could see over most of our position, and every 
man we had was under direct fire for hours 
of each day. As the attack developed, the 
promised help arrived, our warships stood in 
and opened on the Turks with every gun that 
would bear. Some kept down the guns of 
Gaba Tepe, others searched the line of the 
Turk advance, till the hills over which they 
came were swathed with yellow smoke and dust, 
the white clouds of shrapnel, and the drifting 
darkness of conflagration. All the scrub was 
in a blaze before them, but they pressed on, 
falling in heaps and lines; and their guns 



Gallipoli 71 

dropped a never-ceasing rain of shells on 
trenches, beach and shipping. The landing of 
stores and ammunition never ceased during the 
battle. The work of the beach-parties in that 
scene of burning and massacre was beyond all 
praise: so was the work of the fatigue parties 
who passed up and down the hill with water, 
ammunition and food, or dug sheltered roads 
to the trenches; so was the work of the Medical 
Service, who got the wounded out of cuts In the 
earth, so narrow and so twisted that there was 
no using a stretcher and men had to be carried 
on stretcher bearers' backs or on improvised 
chairs made out of packing cases. 

At a little before noon the Turk attack 
reached its height In a blaze and uproar of 
fire, and the swaying forward of their multi- 
tudes. The guns of the warships swept them 
from flank to flank with every engine of death : 
they died by hundreds, and the attack withered 
as It came. Our men saw the enemy fade and 
slacken and halt; then with their cheer they 
charged him and beat him home, seized new 
ground from him, and dug themselves In In 



72 Gallipoli 

front of him. All through the day there was 
fighting up and down the line, partial attacks, 
and never-ceasing shell-fire, but no other great 
attack, the Turks had suffered too much. At 
night their snipers came out in the scrub and 
shot at anything they could see, and all night 
long their men dragged up field guns and piles 
of shrapnel, and worked at the trenches which 
were to contain ours. When day dawned, they 
opened with shrapnel upon the beach, with a 
feu de barrage designed to stop all landing of 
men and stores. They whipped the bay with 
shrapnel bullets. Where their fire was concen- 
trated, the water was lashed as with hail all 
day long; but the boats passed through it, and 
men worked in it, building jetties for the boats 
to land at, using a big Turk shell as a pile 
driver: when they got too hot they bathed in 
it, for no fire shook those men. It was said, 
that when a big shell was coming, men of other 
races would go into their dugouts, but that these 
men paused only to call it a bastard and then 
went on with their work. 

By the night of the second day, the Aus- 



Gallipoli 73 

trallan and New Zealand Army Corps had won 
and fortified their position. Men writing or 
reporting on service about them referred to 
them as the A. N. Z. A. C, and these letters 
soon came to mean the place in which they were, 
un-named till then, probably, save by some 
rough Turkish place-name, but now likely to 
be printed on all English maps, with the other 
names, of Brighton Beach and Hell Spit, which 
mark a great passage of arms. 



Ill 



King Marsilies parted his army: ten columns he 
kept by him, and the other ten rode in to fight. The 
Franks said: ''God, what ruin we shall have here. 
What will become of the twelve Peers ? " The Arch- 
bishop Turpin answered first : '' Good knights, you 
are the friends of God; to-day you will be crowned 
and flowered, resting in the holy flowers of Paradise, 
where no coward will ever come." 

The Franks answered : " We will not fail. If it 
be God's will, we will not murmur. We will fight 
against our enemies: we are few men, but well-hard- 
ened." 

They spurred forward to fight the pagans. The 
Franks and Saracens are mingled. 

The Song of Roland. 



This early fighting, which lasted from dawn 
on the 25th April till noon on the following 
day, won us a footing, not more than that, on 
the Peninsula; it settled the German brag that 
we should never be able to land. We had 
landed upon, had taken, and were holding the 
whole of the southwestern extremity of the 
Peninsula and a strip of the iEgean coast, in 
the face of an army never less than twice our 
strength, strongly entrenched and well supplied. 
We had lost very heavily in the attack, our 
men were weary from the exceedingly severe 
service of the landing, but the morrow began 
the second passage in the campaign, the advance 
from the sea, before the Turks should have re- 
covered. 

Many have said to me, with a naivete that 
would be touching if it were not so plainly in- 
spired by our enemies: *' Why did not the 
troops press on at once, the day they landed? 
The Japanese pressed on the day they landed, 

17 



7 8 GalUpoli 

so did the Americans In Cuba. If you had 
pressed on at once, you would have won the 
whole Peninsula. The Turks were at their last 
cartridge, and would have surrendered.'* 

It is quite true that the Japanese moved in- 
land immediately from their transports at 
Chemulpho and Chlnampo. Those ports were 
seized before the Russians knew that war was 
declared: they were not defended by Russian 
soldiers, and the two small Russian cruisers 
caught there by the Japanese fleet were put out 
of action before the transports discharged. 
The Japanese were free to land as they chose 
on beaches prepared, not with machine guns 
and mines, but with cranes, gangways and good 
roads. Even so, they did not press on. The 
Japanese do not press on unless they are at- 
tacking: they are as prudent as they are brave: 
they waited till they were ready and then 
marched on. The Americans landed at Dai- 
quiri and at Guanica unopposed and in neither 
case engaged the enemy till next day. 

In the preceding chapter I have tried to show 
why we did not press on at once, after land- 



Gallipoli 79 

ing. We did not, because we could not, be- 
cause two fresh men strongly entrenched, with 
machine guns, will stop one tired man with a 
rifle in nine cases out of ten. Our men had 
done the unimaginable in getting ashore at all, 
they could not do the impossible on the same 
day. I used to say this, to draw the answer, 
" Well, other troops would have done it," so 
that I might say, what I know to be the truth, 
that no other men on this earth either would 
have or could have made good the landing; 
and that the men have not yet been born who 
could have advanced after such a feat of arms. 
The efforts of men are limited by their 
strength: the strength of men, always easily 
exhausted, is the only strength at the disposal 
of a general, it Is the money to be spent by 
him in the purchase of victory, whether by 
hours of marching In the mud, digging in the 
field, or in attack. Losses in attack are great, 
though occasional, losses from other causes 
are great and constant. All armies in the field 
have to be supplied constantly with fresh drafts 
to make good the losses from attack and ex- 



8o Gallipoli 

haustion. No armies can move without these 
replenishments, just as no Individual men can 
go on working, after excessive labour, without 
rest and food. Our losses In the landings were 
severe, even for modern war, even for the 
Dardanelles. The bloodiest battle of modern 
times Is said to have been Antletam or Sharps- 
burg, in the American Civil War, where the 
losses were perhaps nearly one-third of the 
men engaged. At V Beach the Munsters lost 
more than one-third, and the Dubllns more 
than three-fifths of their total strength. The 
Lancashires at W Beach lost nearly as heavily 
as the Dubllns. At Anzac, one Australian bat- 
talion lost 422 out of 900. At X Beach, the 
Royals lost 487 out of 979. All these battal- 
ions had lost more than half their officers, in- 
deed by the 28th April the Dubllns had only 
one officer left. How could these dwindled 
battalions press on? 

Then for the individual exhaustion. Those 
engaged In the first landing were clambering 
and fighting in great heat, without proper food, 
and In many cases without water, for the first 



Gallipoli 8 1 

24 or 36 hours, varying the fighting with hur- 
ried but deep digging in marl or clay, getting 
no sleep, nor any moment's respite from the 
peril of death. Then, at the end of the first 
phase, when the fact that they had won the 
landing was plain, some of these same men, 
unrested, improperly fed, and wet through 
with rain, sweat and the sea, had to hold what 
they had won, while the others went down to 
the beach to make piers, quarry roads, dig shel- 
ters, and wade out to carry or drag on shore 
food, drink, munitions and heavy guns, and to 
do this without appliances, by the strength of 
their arms. Then when these things had been 
done almost to the limit of human endurance, 
they carried water, food and ammunlton to the 
trenches, not In carts but on their backs, and 
then relieved their fellows in the trenches and 
withstood the Turk attacks and replied to the 
Turks' fire for hours on end. At Anzac the 
A. N. Z. Army Corps had " 96 hours' continu- 
ous fighting In the trenches with little or no 
sleep " and " at no time during the 96 hours 
did the Turks' firing cease, although it varied 



82 Gallipoli 

In volume; at times the fusillade was simply 
deafening." Men worked like this, to the 
limit of physical endurance, under every possi- 
ble exposure to wet, heat, cold, death, hunger, 
thirst and want of rest, become exhausted, and 
their nerves shattered, not from fear, which 
was a thing those men did not understand, but 
because the machine breaks. On the top of the 
misery, exhaustion and nerve-ceasing peril. Is 
" the dreadful anxiety of not knowing how the 
battle Is progressing," and the still worse anx- 
iety of vigilance. To the strain of keeping 
awake, when dead-beat. Is added the strain of 
watching men, peering for spies, stalking for 
snipers and listening for bombing-parties. Un- 
der all these strains the minds of strong men 
give way. They are the intensest strains ever 
put upon Intelligences. Men subjected to them 
for many hours at a time cannot at once " press 
on," however brave their hearts may be. 
Those who are unjust enough to think that they 
can, or could, should work for a summer's day, 
without food or drink, at digging, then work 
for a night In the rain carrying heavy boxes, 



GaUipoli 83 

then dig for some hours longer, and at the end 
ask me to fire a machine gun at them while they 
" press on," across barbed wire, in what they 
presume to be the proper manner. 

Our men could not " press on " at once. 
They had not enough unwounded men to do 
more than hold the hordes of fresh Turks con- 
tinually brought up against them. They had 
no guns ashore to prepare an advance, nor 
enough rifle ammunition to stand a siege. 
[They had the rations In their packs and the 
water In their bottles, and no other supplies 
but the seven days' food, water and rifle ammu- 
nition put into each boat at the landing. To 
get men, stores, water and guns ashore, under 
fire, on beaches without wharves, cranes or der- 
ricks of any kind, takes time, and until men and 
goods were landed no advance was possible. 
Until then, our task was not to press on, but to 
hang on, like grim death. It was for the 
enemy to press on, to beat our tired troops be- 
fore their supports could be landed, and this 
the Turks very well understood, as their cap- 
tured orders show, and as their behaviour 



84 Gallipoli 

showed only too clearly. During the days 
which followed the landing, the Turks, far 
from being at their last cartridge, and eager to 
surrender, prevented our pressing on, by press- 
ing on themselves, In Immense force and with a 
great artillery, till our men were dying of fa- 
tigue in driving back their attacks. 

One point more may be discussed, before re- 
suming the story. The legend, *' that the 
Turks were at their last cartridge and would 
have surrendered had we advanced," Is very 
widely spread abroad by German emissaries. 
It appears In many forms, in print, in the lec- 
ture and in conversation. Sometimes place and 
date are given, sometimes the authority, all con- 
fidently, but always differently. It Is well to 
state here the truth so that the lie may be 
known. The Turks were never at the end of 
their supplies. They were always better and 
more certainly supplied with shells and cart- 
ridges than we were. If they were ever (as 
perhaps they sometimes were) rather short of 
big gun ammunition, so were we. If they were 
sometimes rather short of rifles and rifle am- 



Gallipoli 85 

munition, so were we. If they were often short 
of food and all-precious water, so were we, and 
more so, and doubly more so. For all our sup- 
plies came over hundreds of miles of stormy 
water infested by submarines and were landed 
on open beaches under shell fire, and their sup- 
plies came along the Asiatic coast and by ferry 
across the Hellespont, and thence, in compara- 
tive safety, by road to the trenches. The 
Turkish army was well supplied, well equipped, 
more numerous and in better positions than our 
own. There was neither talk nor thought 
among them at any time of surrender, nor could 
there have been, in an army so placed and so 
valiant. There was some little disaffection 
among them. jThey hated their German offi- 
cers and the German methods of discipline so 
much that many prisoners when taken expressed 
pleasure at being taken, spat at the name of 
German, and said " English good, German 
bad." Some of this, however, may have been 
Levantine tact. 

Late on the 26th April, the French corps 
landed men at V Beach and took the trenches 



86 Gain poll 

on the right of the ground won, i.e., towards 
the Straits. At noon the next day the whole 
force advanced inland without much opposition, 
for rather more than a mile. At nightfall on 
the 27th, they held a line across the Peninsula 
from the mouth of the Sighir watercourse (on 
the iEgean) to Eski Hissarlik (on the Straits). 
The men were very weary from the incessant 
digging of trenches, fighting, and dragging up of 
stores from the beach. They dug themselves 
in under shell and rifle fire, stood to their arms 
to repel Turk attacks for most of the night, and 
at eight next morning began the battle of the 
28th of April. The French corps was on the 
right. The 29th Division (with one battalion 
of the R. N. Division), on the left. They ad- 
vanced across rough moorland and little culti- 
vated patches to attack the Turk town of 
Krithia. All the ground over which they ad- 
vanced gave cover of the best kind to the de- 
fence. All through the morning, at odd times, 
the creeping companies going over that broken 
country came suddenly under the fire of ma- 
chine guns, and lost men before they could 



Gallipoli 87 

fling themselves down. In the heather and 
torrent-beds of the Scotch-looking moorland 
the Turk had only to wait in cover till his 
targets appeared, climbing a wall or getting out 
of a gulley, then he could turn on his machine 
guns, at six hundred shots a minute each, and 
hold up the advance. From time to time the 
Turks attacked in great numbers. Early in 
the afternoon our advance reached its furthest 
point, about three quarters of a mile from 
Krithia. Our artillery, short of ammunition 
at the best of times, and In these early days 
short of guns, too, did what it could, though 
it had only shrapnel, which is of small service 
against an entrenched enemy. Those who 
were there have said that nothing depressed 
them more than the occasional shells from our 
guns In answer to the continual fire from the 
Turk artillery. They felt themselves out- 
gunned and without support. Rifle cartridges 
were running short, for, In spite of desperate 
efforts, In that roadless wild land with the 
beaches jammed with dead, wounded, stores, 
the wrecks of boats, and parties trying to build 



88 Gallipoli 

piers under shell-fire, it was not possible to 
land or to send up cartridges in the quantity 
needed. There were not yet enough mules 
ashore to take the cartridge-boxes and men 
could not be spared; there were too few men to 
hold the line. Gradually our men fell back 
a little from the ground they had won. The 
Turks brought up more men, charged us, and 
drove us back a little more, and were then 
themselves held. Our men dug themselves in 
as best they could and passed another anxious 
night, in bitter cold and driving rain, staving 
off a Turk attack, which was pressed with reso- 
lute courage against our centre and the French 
corps to the right of it. There were very 
heavy losses on both sides, but the Turks were 
killed in companies at every point of attack and 
failed to drive us further. 

The next two days were passed in compara- 
tive quiet, in strengthening the lines, landing 
men, guns and stores and preparing for the 
next advance. This war has shown what an 
immense reserve of shell is needed to prepare 
a modern advance. Our men never had that 



Gallipoli 89 

immense reserve, nor, Indeed a large reserve, 
and in those early days they had no reserve at 
all, but a day to day allowance, and before a 
reserve was formed the Turks came down upon 
us with every man and gun they had, in the des- 
perate night attack of the ist of May. This 
began with shell-fire at ten P. M., and was fol- 
lowed half-an-hour later by a succession of 
charges in close order. The Turk front ranks 
crept up on hands and knees without firing 
(their cartridges had been taken from them) 
and charged our trenches with the bayonet. 
They got into our trenches in the dark, bayo- 
neted the men in them, broke our line, got 
through to the second line and were there 
mixed up In the night in a welter of killing and 
firing beyond description. The moon had not 
risen when the attack came home. The fight- 
ing took place in the dark: men fired and 
stabbed in all directions, at flashes, at shouts, 
by the burning of the flares, by the coloured 
lights of the Turk officers, and by the gleams 
of the shells on our right. There were 9,000 
Turks in the first line, 12,000 more behind 



90 GaUipoli 

them. They advanced yelling for God and 
Enver Pasha, amid the roar of every gun and 
rifle In range. They broke through the French, 
were held, then driven back, then came again, 
bore everything before them, and then met the 
British supports and went no further. Our 
supports charged the Turks and beat them 
back; at dawn our entire line advanced and 
beat them back in a rout, till their machine guns 
stopped us. 

Upon many of the dead Turks in front of 
the French and English trenches were copies 
of an address issued by a German officer, one 
Von Zowenstern, calling on the Turks to de- 
stroy the enemy, since their only hope of salva- 
tion was to win the battle or die in the at- 
tempt. On some bodies were other orders, 
for the Mahometan priests to encourage the 
men to advance, for officers to shoot those sol- 
diers who hung back, and for prisoners to be 
left with the reserves, not taken to the rear. 
In this early part of the campaign there were 
many German officers in the Turkish army. 
In these early night attacks they endeavoured 



Gallipoli 91 

to confuse our men by shouting orders to them 
in Enghsh. One, on the day of the landing, 
walked up to one of the trenches of the 29th 
Division and cried out, " Surrender, you Eng- 
lish, we ten to one." " He was thereupon hit 
on the head with a spade by a man who was im- 
proving his trench with it." 

This battle never ceased for five days. 
The artillery was never silent. Our men were 
shelled, sniped and shrapnelled every day and 
all day long, and at night the Turks attacked 
with the bayonet. By the evening of the 5th 
May the 29th Division, which had won the 
end of the Peninsula, had been reduced by one- 
half and its officers by two-thirds. The pro- 
portion of officers to men in a British battalion 
is as one to thirty-seven, but in the list of killed 
the proportion was as one to eleven. The offi- 
cers of that wonderful company poured out 
their lives like water; they brought their weary 
men forward hour after hour in all that sleep- 
less ten days, and at the end led them on once 
more in the great attack of the 6th-8th of May. 

This attack was designed to push the Allied 



92 Gallipoli 

lines further forward into the Peninsula, so 
as to win a little more ground, and ease the 
growing congestion on the beaches near Cape 
Helles. The main Turkish position lay on and 
about the hump of Achi Baba, and on the high 
ground stretching down from it. It was hoped 
that even if Achi Baba could not be carried, the 
ground below him, including the village of 
Krithia, might be taken. The movement was 
to be a general advance, with the French on 
the right attacking the high ground nearer to 
the Straits, the 29th Division on the left, be- 
tween the French and the sea, attacking the 
slowly sloping ground which leads past Krithia 
up to Achi Baba. Krithia stands high upon the 
slope, among orchards and gardens, and makes 
a good artillery target, but the slope on which 
it stands, being much broken, covered with 
dense scrub (some of it thorny) and with 
clumps of trees, is excellent for defence. The 
Turks had protected that square mile of ground 
with many machine guns and trenches so skil- 
fully concealed that they could not be seen 
either from close in front or from aero- 







c 



^5 

Is 

a, 
< 



Ji bij 



bCJ3 



bfl 



Gallipoli 93 

planes. The French line of attack was over 
ground equally difficult, but steeper, and there- 
fore giving more " dead ground,'' or patches 
upon which no direct fire can be turned by the 
defence. The line of battle from the French 
right to the English left stretched right across 
the Peninsula with a front (owing to bends 
and salients) of about five miles. It was nearly 
everywhere commanded by the guns of Achi 
Baba, and in certain places the enemy batteries 
on the Turk left, near the Straits, could enfilade 
it. Our men were weary but the Turks were 
expecting strong reinforcements; the attack 
could not be delayed. 

Few people who have not seen modern war 
can understand what it is like. They look at 
a map, which is a small flat surface, and find 
It difficult to believe that a body of men could 
have had difficulty in passing from one point 
upon It to another. They think that they them- 
selves would have found no difficulty, that they 
would not have been weary nor thirsty, the dis- 
tance demanded of them being only a mile, 
possibly a mile and a quarter, and the reward 



94 GaUipoli 

a very great one. They think that troops who 
failed to pass across that mile must have been 
In some way wanting, and that had they been 
there, either In command or In the attack, the 
results would have been different. 

One can only answer, that In modern war It Is 
not easy to carry a well-defended site by direct 
attack. In modern war, you may not know, till 
fire breaks out upon you, where the defence, 
which you have to attack, Is hidden. You may 
not know (In darkness. In a strange land) more 
than vaguely which Is your " front," and you 
may pass by your enemy, or over him, or under 
him without seeing him. You may not see your 
enemy at all. You may fight for days and 
never see an enemy. In modern war troops see 
no enemy till he attacks them; then, in most 
cases If they are well entrenched with many 
guns behind them, they can destroy him. 

The Allied ofl^cers, looking through their 
field glasses at the ground to be attacked, could 
see only rough, sloping ground, much gullied, 
much overgrown, with a few clumps of trees, a 
few walls, orchards and houses, but no guns, no 



GaUipoli 95 

trenches, no enemy. Aeroplanes scouting over 
the Turks could see men but not the trenches 
nor the guns, they could only report that they 
suspected them to be in such a place. Some- 
times in the mornings men would notice that 
the earth was turned newly on some bare patch 
on the hill, but none could be sure that this dig- 
ging was not a ruse to draw fire. The trenches 
were hidden cunningly, often with a head-cover 
of planks so strewn with earth and planted with 
scrub as to be indistinguishable from the ground 
about. tThe big guns were coloured cunningly, 
like a bird or snake upon the ground. From 
above in an aeroplane an observer could not pick 
them out so as to be certain, if they were not 
in action at the time. Brave men scouting for- 
ward at night to reconnoitre brought back some 
information, but not more than enough to show 
that the Turks were there in force. No man in 
the Allied Army expected less than a desperate 
battle; no officer in the world could have made 
it anything but that, with all the odds against 
us. Nothing could be done but cover the 
Turk position with the fire of every gun on 



g6 Gallipoli 

shore or in the ships and then send the men for- 
ward, to creep or dash as far as they could, 
and then dig themselves in. 

Let the reader imagine himself to be facing 
three miles of any very rough broken sloping 
ground known to him, ground for the most part 
gorse-thyme-and-scrub-covered, being poor soil, 
but in some places beautiful with flowers (es- 
pecially " a spiked yellow flower with a whitish 
leaf") and on others green from cultivation. 
Let him say to himself that he and an army of 
his friends are about to advance up the slope 
towards the top, and that as they will be advanc- 
ing in a line, along the whole length of the three 
miles, he will only see the advance of those 
comparatively near to him, since folds or dips 
in the ground will hide the others. Let him, 
before he advances, look earnestly along the 
line of the hill, as it shows up clear, in blazing 
sunlight only a mile from him, to see his tactical 
objective, one little clump of pines, three hun- 
dred yards away, across what seem to be fields. 
Let him see in the whole length of the hill no 
single human being, nothing but scrub, earth, a 



Gallipoli 97 

few scattered buildings, of the Levantine type 
(dirty white with roofs of dirty red) and some 
patches of dark Scotch pine, growing as the 
pine loves, on bleak crests. Let him Imagine 
himself to be more weary than he has ever been 
In his life before, and dirtier than he has ever 
believed it possible to be, and parched with 
thirst, nervous, wild-eyed and rather lousy. 
Let him think that he has not slept for more 
than a few minutes together for eleven days 
and nights, and that In all his waking hours he 
has been fighting for his life, often hand to 
hand In the dark with a fierce enemy, and that 
after each fight he has had to dig himself a 
hole In the ground, often with his hands, and 
then walk three or four roadless miles to bring 
up heavy boxes under fire. Let him think, too, 
that In all those eleven days he has never for 
an Instant been out of the thunder of cannon, 
that waking or sleeping their devastating crash 
has been blasting the air across within a mile 
or two, and this from an artillery so terrible 
that each discharge beats as It were a wedge 
of shock between the skull-bone and the brain. 



98 Gain poll 

Let him think too that never, for an instant, in 
all that time, has he been free or even partly 
free from the peril of death in its most sudden 
and savage forms, and that hourly in all that 
time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at 
his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven 
mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen 
stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a hand- 
ful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood Is 
caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face, 
and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that 
in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, 
already too few, God knows how many too few, 
for the task to be done, will be gone the same 
way, and that he himself may reckon that he 
has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved 
his last, and that In a few minutes more may 
be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, 
with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an 
arm broken, unable to move but still alive, un- 
able to drive away the flies or screen the ever- 
dropping rain. In a place where none will find 
him, or be able to help him, a place where he 
will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing Is left 



Gallipoli 99 

of him but a few rags and a few remnants and 
a little identification-disc flapping on his bones 
in the wind. Then let him hear the intermit- 
tent crash and rattle of the fire augment sud- 
denly and awfully in a roaring, blasting roll, un- 
speakable and unthinkable, while the air above, 
that has long been whining and whistling, be- 
comes filled with the scream of shells passing 
like great cats of death in the air; let him see the 
slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into 
the white, yellow and black smokes of great ex- 
plosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of 
white puffs marking the hill in streaks where 
the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and 
then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain 
is shaking in his head, let him pull himself to- 
gether with his friends, and clamber up out of 
the trench, to go forward against an invisible 
enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting 
him. 

The Twenty-ninth Division went forward 
under these conditions on the 6th of May. 
They dashed on, or crawled, for a few yards at 
a time, then dropped for a few instants before 



lOO Gallipoli 

squirming on again. In such an advance men 
do not see the battlefield. They see the world 
as the rabbit sees it, crouching on the ground, 
just their own little patch. On broken ground 
like that, full of dips and rises, men may be 
able to see nothing but perhaps the ridge of a 
bank ten feet ahead, with the dust flying in 
spouts all along it, as bullets hit it, some thou- 
sand a minute, and looking back or to their 
flanks they may see no one but perhaps a few 
men of their own platoon lying tense but expect- 
ant, ready for the sign to advance while the 
bullets pipe over them in a never-ending birdlike 
croon. They may be shut off by some all-im- 
portant foot of ground from seeing how they 
are fronting, from all knowledge of what the 
next platoon is doing or suffering. It may be 
quite certain death to peep over that foot of 
ground in order to find out, and while they wait 
for a few instants shells may burst in their 
midst and destroy a half of them. Then the 
rest, nerving themselves, rush up the ridge, and 
fall in a line dead under machine-gun fire. The 
supports come up, creeping over their corpses. 



GalUpoli 10 1 

get past the ridge, into scrub which some shell 
has set on fire. Men fall wounded in the fire, 
and the cartridges in their bandoliers explode 
and slowly kill them. The survivors crawl 
through the scrub, half-choked, and come out 
on a field full of flowers tangled three feet high 
with strong barbed wire. They wait for a 
while, to try to make out where the enemy is. 
They may see nothing but the slope of the field 
running up to a sky line, and a flash of distant 
sea on a flank, but no sign of any enemy, only 
the crash of guns and the pipe and croon and 
spurt of bullets. Gathering themselves to- 
gether their brave men dash out to cut the wire 
and are killed; others take their places and are 
killed; others step out with too great a pride 
even to stoop, and pull up the supports of the 
wires and fling them down, and fall dead on 
top of them, having perhaps cleared a couple 
of yards. Then a couple of machine guns open 
on the survivors and kill them all in thirty sec- 
onds, with the concentrated fire of a battalion. 
The supports come up, and hear about the 
wire from some wounded man who has crawled 



102 Gallipoli 

back through the scrub. They send back word, 
" Held up by wire," and in time the message 
comes to the telephone which has just been 
blown to pieces by a shell. Presently when the 
telephone is repaired, the message reaches the 
gunners, who fire high explosive shells on to 
the wire, and on to the slopes where the machine 
guns may be hidden. Then the supports go on 
over the flowers and are met midway by a con- 
centrated fire of shells, shrapnel, machine guns 
and rifles. Those who are not killed lie down 
among the flowers and begin to scrape little 
heaps of earth with their hands to give protec- 
tion to their heads. In the light sandy marl 
this does not take long, though many are blown 
to pieces or hit In the back as they scrape. As 
before, they cannot see how the rest of the at- 
tack is faring, nor even where the other pla- 
toons of the battalion are; they lie scraping In 
the roots of daffodils and lilies, w^hlle bullets 
sing and shriek a foot or two over their heads. 
A man peering from his place In the flowers may 
make out that the man next to him, some three 
yards away. Is dead, and that the man beyond Is 



Gallipoli 103 

praying, the man beyond him cursing, and the 
man beyond him out of his mind from nerves 
or thirst. 

Long hours pass, but the air above them 
never ceases to cry like a live thing with bullets 
flying. Men are killed or maimed, and the 
wounded cry for water. Men get up to give 
them water and are killed. Shells fall at regu- 
lar intervals along the field. The waiting men 
count the seconds between the shells to check 
the precision of the battery's fire. Some of 
the bursts fling the blossoms and bulbs of 
flowers Into the bodies of men, where they are 
found long afterwards by the X-rays. Bursts 
and roars of fire on either flank tell of some 
intense moment in other parts of the line. 
Every feeling of terror and mental anguish and 
anxiety goes through the mind of each man 
there, and is put down by resolve. 

The supports come up, they rise with a cheer, 
and get out of the accursed flowers, into a gulley 
where some men of their regiment are already 
lying dead. There is a Httle wood to their 
front; they make for that, and suddenly come 



I04 Gallipoli 

upon a deep and narrow Turk trench full of 
men. This is their first sight of the enemy. 
They leap down into the trench and fight hand 
to hand, kill and are killed, in the long grave 
already dug. They take the trench, but open- 
ing from the trench are saps, which the Turks 
still hold. Men are shot dead at these saps 
by Turk sharpshooters cunningly screened 
within them. Bullets fall in particular places 
in the trench from snipers hidden in the trees 
of the wood. The men send back for bombs, 
others try to find out where the rest of the bat- 
talion lies, or send word that from the noise of 
the fire there must be a battery of machine guns 
beyond the wood, if the guns would shell it. 

Presently, before the bombs come, bombs be- 
gin to drop among them from the Turks. 
Creeping up, the men catch them in their hands 
before they explode and fling them back so 
that they burst among the Turks. Some have 
their hands blown off, other their heads, in 
doing this, but the bloody game of catch goes 
on till no Turks are left in the sap, only a few 
wounded groaning men who slowly bleed to 



Gallipoli 105 

death there. After long hours, the supports 
come up and a storm of high explosives searches 
the little wood, and then with a cheer the rem- 
nant goes forward out of the trench into the 
darkness of the pines. Fire opens on them 
from snipers in the trees and from machine 
guns everywhere; they drop and die, and the 
survivors see no enemy, only their friends fall- 
ing and a place where no living thing can pass. 
Men find themselves suddenly alone, with all 
their friends dead, and no enemy in sight, but 
the rush of bullets filling the air. They go back 
to the trench, not afraid, but in a kind of maze, 
and as they take stock and count their strength 
there comes the roar of the Turkish war cry, 
the drum-like proclamation of the faith, and 
the Turks come at them with the bayonet. 
Then that lonely remnant of a platoon stands 
to it with rapid fire, and the machine gun rattles 
like a motor bicycle, and some ribald or silly 
song goes up, and the Turks fail to get home, 
but die or waver and retreat and are themselves 
charged as they turn. It Is evening now; the 
day has passed in long hours of deep experience, 



io6 GalHpoli 

and the men have made two hundred yards. 
They send back for supports and orders, link 
up, if they are lucky, with some other part of 
their battalion, whose adventures, fifty yards 
away, have been as intense, but wholly different, 
and prepare the Turk trench for the night. 
Presently word reaches them from some far- 
away H. Q. (some dug-out five hundred yards 
back, in what seems, by comparison, like peace- 
ful England) that there are no supports, and 
that the orders are to hold the line at all costs 
and prepare for a fresh advance on the morrow. 
Darkness falls, and ammunition and water 
come up, and the stretcher-bearers hunt for the 
wounded by the groans, while the Turks search 
the entire field with shell to kill the supports 
which are not there. Some of the men in the 
trench creep out to their front, and are killed 
there as they fix a wire entanglement. The 
survivors make ready for the Turk attack, cer- 
tain soon to come. There is no thought of 
sleep; it is too cold for sleep; the men shiver 
as they stare into the night; they take the coats 
of the dead, and try to get a little warmth. 



Gallipoli 107 

There is no moon and the rain begins. The 
marl at the bottom of the trench is soon a sticky 
mud, and the one dry patch is continually being 
sniped. A few exhausted ones fall not into 
sleep but into nervous dreams, full of twitches 
and cries, like dogs' nightmares, and away at 
sea some ship opens with her great guns at an 
unseen target up the hill. The terrific crashes 
shake the air; some one sees a movement in the 
grass and fires; others start up and fire. The 
whole irregular line starts up and fires, the ma- 
chine guns rattle, the officers curse, and the guns 
behind, expecting an attack, send shells into 
the woods. Then slowly the fire drops and 
dies, and stray Turks, creeping up, fling bombs 
into the trench. 

This kind of fighting, between isolated bodies 
of men advancing in a great concerted tactical 
movement stretching right across the Peninsula, 
went on throughout the 6th, the 7th and the 8th 
of May, and ended on the evening of the 8th 
in a terrific onslaught of the whole line, covered 
by a great artillery. The final stage of the 



io8 GaUipoli 

battle was a sight of stirring and awful beauty. 
The Allied line went forward steadily behind 
the moving barrier of the explosions of their 
shells. Every gun on both sides opened and 
maintained a fire dreadful to hear and see. 
Our men were fighting for a little patch of 
ground vital not so much to the success of the 
undertaking, the clearing of the Narrows, as 
to their existence on the Peninsula. In such a 
battle, each platoon, each section, each private 
soldier influences the result, and " pays as cur- 
rent coin In that red purchase " as the brigadier. 
The working parties on the beaches left their 
work (it IS said) to watch and cheer that last 
advance. It was a day of the unmatchable 
clear iEgean spring; Samothrace and Euboea 
were stretched out In the sunset like giants 
watching the chess, waiting, It seemed, almost 
like human things, as they had waited for the 
fall of Troy and the bale-fires of Agamemnon. 
Those watchers saw the dotted order of our 
advance stretching across the Peninsula, moving 
slowly forward, and halting and withering 
away, among fields of flowers of spring and 



Gallipoli 109 

the young corn that would never come to har- 
vest. They saw the hump of Achi Baba flicker 
and burn and roll up to heaven in a swathe of 
blackness, and multitudinous brightness chang- 
ing the face of the earth, and the dots of our 
line still coming, still moving forward, and 
halting and withering away, but still moving up 
among the flashes and the darkness, more men, 
and yet more men, from the fields of sacred 
France, from the darkness of Senegal, from 
sheep-runs at the ends of the earth, from blue- 
gum-forests, and sunny islands, places of horses 
and good fellows, from Irish pastures and 
glens, and from many a Scotch and English city 
and village and quiet farm; they went on and 
they went on, up ridges blazing with explosion 
into the darkness of death. Sometimes, as the 
light failed, and peak after peak that had been 
burning against the sky, grew rigid as the col- 
our faded, the darkness of the great blasts hid 
sections of the line, but when the darkness 
cleared they were still there, line after line of 
dots, still more, still moving forward and halt- 
ing and withering away, and others coming, 



no Gallipoli 

and halting and withering away, and others fol- 
lowing, as though those lines were not flesh and 
blood and breaking nerve but some tide of the 
sea coming in waves that fell yet advanced, 
that broke a little further, and gained some 
yard in breaking, and were then followed, and 
slowly grew, that halted and seemed to wither, 
and then gathered and went on, till night cov- 
ered those moving dots, and the great slope was 
nothing but a blackness spangled with the flashes 
of awful fire. 

What can be said of that advance? The 
French were on the right, the Twenty-ninth 
Division on the left, some Australians and New 
Zealanders (brought down from Anzac) In 
support. It was their thirteenth day of con- 
tinual battle, and who will ever write the story 
of even one half-hour of that thirteenth day? 
Who will ever know one hundredth part of the 
deeds of heroism done in them, by platoons 
and sections and private soldiers, who offered 
their lives without a thought to help some other 
part of the line, who went out to cut wire, or 
brought up water and ammunition, or cheered 



Gallipoli 1 1 1 

on some bleeding remnant of a regiment, halt- 
ing on that hill of death, and kept their faces 
to the shrapnel and the never-ceasing pelt of 
bullets, as long as they had strength to go and 
light to see? They brought the line forward 
from a quarter of a mile to six hundred yards 
further Into the Peninsula; they dug In after 
dark on the line they had won, and for the next 
thirty-six hours they stood to arms to beat back 
the charges of the Turks who felt themselves 
threatened at the heart. 

Our army had won their hold upon the Pen- 
insula. On the body of a dead Turk officer 
was a letter written the night before to his wife, 
a tender letter, filled mostly with personal mat- 
ters. In it was the phrase, *' These British are 
the finest fighters in the world. We have 
chosen the wrong friends." 



IV 



So great is the heat that the dust rises. 

The Song of Roland, 



During the next three weeks, the Allied troops 
made small advances in parts of the lines held 
by them at Anzac and Cape Helles. Fight- 
ing was continuous in both zones, there was al- 
ways much (and sometimes intense) artillery 
fire. The Turks frequently attacked in force, 
sometimes in very great force, but were re- 
pulsed. Our efforts were usually concentrated 
on some redoubt, stronghold, or salient, in the 
nearer Turkish lines, the fire from which galled 
our trenches, or threatened any possible ad- 
vance. These posts were either heavily bom- 
barded and then rushed under the cover of a 
feu de barrage, or carried by surprise attack. 
Great skill and much dashing courage were 
shown in these assaults. The emplacements 
of machine guns were seized and the guns de- 
stroyed, dangerous trenches or parts of trenches 
were carried and filled in, and many roosts or 
hiding places of snipers were made untenable. 

IIS 



ii6 Gallipoli 

These operations were on a small scale, and 
were designed to improve the position then held 
by us, rather than to carry the whole line further 
up the Peninsula. Sometimes they failed, but 
by far the greater number succeeded, so that 
by these methods, eked out by ruses, mines, 
clever invention and the most dare-devil brav* 
ery, parts of our lines were advanced by more 
than a hundred yards. 

On the 4th of June, a second great attack 
was made by the AlHed troops near Cape 
Helles. Like the attack of the 6th-8th May, 
it was an advance of the whole line, from the 
Straits to the sea, against the enemy's front 
line trenches. As before, the French were on 
the right and the 29th Division on the left, but 
between them, in this advance, were the R. N. 
Division and the newly arrived 42nd Division. 
Our men advanced after a prolonged and terri- 
ble bombardment, which so broke down the 
Turk defence that the works were carried all 
along the line, except in one place, on the left 
of the French sector and in one other place, 
on our own left, near the sea. Our advance, 




»5f %fi» i^ 



i- if Ut-i 



Gallipoli 117 

as before, varied in depth from a quarter of 
a mile to six hundred yards; all of it carried 
by a rush, in a short time, owing to the violence 
of the artillery preparation, though with heavy 
losses from shrapnel and machine-gun fire. In 
this attack, the 42nd or East Lancashire Divi- 
sion received Its baptism of fire. Even those 
who had seen the men of the 29th Division 
in the battles for the landing admitted that 
" nothing could have been finer " than the ex- 
treme gallantry of these newly landed men. 
The Manchester Brigade and two companies 
of the 5th Lancashire Fusiliers advanced with 
the most glorious and dashing courage, routed 
the Turks, carried both their lines of trenches; 
and one battalion, the 6th, very nearly carried 
the village of Krithia; there was, in fact, no 
entrenched line between them and the top of 
Achi Baba. 

But in this campaign we were to taste, and 
be upon the brink of victory in every battle, yet 
have the prize dashed from us, by some fail- 
ure elsewhere, each time. So, in this first rush, 
when, for the first time, our men felt that they, 



ii8 Gain poll 

not the Turks, were the real attackers, the vic- 
tory was not to remain with us. We had no 
high explosive shell and not enough shrapnel 
shell to deny to the Turks the use of their 
superior numbers and to hold them in a beaten 
state. They ralUed and made strong counter- 
attacks especially upon a redoubt or earthwork- 
fortress called the " Haricot," on the left of the 
French sector, which the French had stormed 
an hour before and garrisoned with Senegalese 
troops. The Turks heavily shelled this work 
and then rushed it; the Senegalese could not 
hold it; the French could not support it; and 
the Turks won it. Unfortunately, the Haricot 
enfiladed the lines we had won. In a little 
while the Turks developed from it a deadly en- 
filade fire upon the R. N. Division which had 
won the Turk trenches to the west of it. The 
R. N. Division was forced to fall back and in 
doing so uncovered the right of the Brigade of 
Manchesters beyond it to the westward. The 
Manchesters were forced to give ground, the 
French were unable to make a new attack upon 
the Haricot, so that by nightfall our position 



GalUpoli 119 

was less good than it had been at half-past 
twelve. 

But for the fall of the Haricot the day would 
have been a notable victory for ourselves. 
Still, over three miles of the Allied front, our 
lines had been pushed forward from 200 to 
400 yards. This, in modern war is a big ad- 
vance, but it brings upon the conquerors a very 
severe labor of digging. The trenches won 
from the defence have to be converted to the 
uses of the attack and linked up, by saps and 
communication-trenches, with the works from 
which the attack advanced. All this labour 
had to be done by our men in the midst of bit- 
ter fighting, for the Turks fought hard to win 
back these trenches in many bloody counter at- 
tacks, and (as always happened, after each ad- 
vance) outlying works and trenches, from 
which fire could be brought to bear upon the 
newly won ground, had to be carried, filled in, 
or blown up before the new line was secure. 

A little after dawn on the 21st June the 
French stormed and won the Haricot redoubt, 
and advanced the right of the Allied position 



1 20 Gallipoli 

by 600 yards ; the Turkish counter attacks were 
bloodily defeated. 

In the forenoon of the 28th June, the English 
divisions advanced the left of the Allied posi- 
tion by a full 1,000 yards. This attack, which 
was one of the most successful of the cam- 
paign, was the first of which it could be said 
that it was a victory. Of course our presence 
upon the Peninsula was in itself a victory, but 
in this battle we were not trying to land nor 
to secure ourselves, but (for the first time) to 
force a decision. Three of our divisions chal- 
lenged the greater part of the Turk army and 
beat it. And here, for the first time in the 
operations, we felt, what all our soldiers had 
expected, that want of fresh men in reserve to 
make a success decisive, which afterwards lost 
us the campaign. 

Our enemies have often said, that the Eng- 
lish cannot plan nor execute an attack. In this 
battle of June 28th, the attack was a perfect 
piece of planning and execution. Everything 
was exactly timed, everything worked smoothly. 
Ten thousand soldiers, not one of whom had 



Gallipoli 121 

had more than six months' training, advanced 
uphill after an artillery preparation and won 
two lines of elaborately fortified trenches, by 
the bayonet alone. Then, while these men con- 
solidated and made good the ground which they 
had won, the artillery lengthened their fuses 
and bombarded the ground beyond them. 
When the artillery ceased, ten thousand fresh 
soldiers climbed out of the English lines, ran 
forward, leaped across the two lines of Turk 
trench already taken and took three more lines 
of trench, each line a fortress in itself. Be- 
sides advancing our position a thousand yards, 
this attack forced back the right of the Turks 
from the sea, and won a strong position be- 
tween the sea and Krithia, almost turning Achi 
Baba. But much more than this was achieved. 
The great triumph of the day was the certainty 
then acquired that the Turks were beaten, that 
they were no longer the fierce and ardent fight- 
ers who had rushed V beach in the dark, but 
a shaken company who had caught the habit of 
defeat and might break at any moment. They 
were beaten; we had beaten them at every point 



122 GalUpoli 

and they knew that they were beaten. Every 
man in the French and British lines knew that 
the Turks were at the breaking point. We 
had only to strike while the iron was hot to 
end them. 

As happened afterwards, after the battle of 
August, we could not strike while the iron was 
hot; we had not the men nor the munitions. 
Had the fifty thousand men who came there in 
July and August but been there in June, our men 
could have kept on striking. But they were 
not there in June, and our victory of the 28th 
could not be followed up. More than a month 
passed before it could be followed up. Dur- 
ing that month the Turks dug themselves new 
fortresses, brought up new guns, made new 
stores of ammunition, and remade their army. 
Their beaten troops were withdrawn and re- 
placed by the very pick and flower of the Turk- 
ish Empire. When we attacked again, we 
found a very different enemy; the iron was cold, 
we had to begin again from the beginning. 

Thirty-six hours after our June success, at 
midnight in the night of June 29-30th, the 



GalUpoli 123 

Turks made a counter attack, not at Cape 
Helles, where their men were shaken, but at 
Anzac, where perhaps they felt our menace 
more acutely. A large army of Turks, about 
30,000 strong, ordered by Enver Pasha " to 
drive the foreigners into the sea or never to 
look upon his face again," attacked the Anzac 
position under cover of the fire of a great artil- 
lery. They were utterly defeated with the loss 
of about a quarter of their strength, some 
7-8,000 killed and wounded. 

All this fighting proved clearly that the 
Turks, with all their power of fresh men, their 
closeness to their reserves, and their superior 
positions, could not beat us from what we had 
secured, nor keep us from securing more. Our 
advance into the Peninsula, though slow and 
paid for with much life, was sure and becom- 
ing less slow. What we had won we had 
fought hard for and never ceased to fight hard 
for, but we had won it and could hold it, and 
with increasing speed add to it, and the Turks 
knew this as well as we did. But early in May 
something happened which had a profound 



124 GallipoH 

result upon the course of the operations. It 
is necessary to write of it at length, if only to 
show the reader that this Dardanelles Cam- 
paign was not a war in itself, but a part of a 
war involving most of Europe and half of 
Asia, and that, that being so, it was affected 
by events in other parts of the war, as deeply 
as it affected those parts in turn by its own 
events. 

No one, of the many who spoke to me about 
the campaign, knew or understood that the 
campaign, as planned, was not to be, solely, a 
French and English venture, but (in its later 
stages) a double attack upon the Turkish 
power, by ourselves, on the Peninsula and the 
Hellespont, and by the Russians, on the shores 
of the Black Sea. The double attack, threaten- 
ing Turkey at the heart, was designed to force 
the Turks to divide their strength, and, by caus- 
ing uneasiness among the citizens, to keep in 
and about Constantinople a large army which 
might otherwise wreck our Mesopotamian ex- 
pedition, threaten India and Egypt and prevent 
the Grand Duke Nicholas from advancing 



Gallipoli 125 

from the Caucasus on Erzerum. But as the 
Polish campaign developed adversely to Russia, 
it became clear that it would be impossible for 
her to give the assistance she had hoped. 

Early in May, Sir Ian Hamilton learned, 
that his advance, instead of being a part of a 
concerted scheme, was to be the only attack 
upon the Turks in that quarter, and that he 
would have to withstand the greater part of the 
Turkish army. This did not mean that the 
Turks could mass an overwhelming strength 
against any part of his positions, since in the 
narrow Peninsula there is not room for great 
numbers to manoeuvre; but it meant that the 
Turks would have always within easy distance 
great reserves of fresh men to take the place 
of those exhausted, and that without a corre- 
spondingly great reserve we had little chance of 
decisive success. 

This change in the strategical scheme was 
made after we were committed to the venture: 
it made a profound difference to our position. 
Unfortunately we were so deeply engaged in 
other theatres that it was impossible to change 



126 Gain poll 

our plans as swiftly and as profoundly as our 
chances. The great reserve could not be sent 
when it became necessary, early in May, nor 
for more than two months. Until it came, it 
happened, time after time, that even when we 
fought and beat back the Turks they could be 
reinforced before we could. All through the 
campaign we fought them and beat them back, 
but always, on the day after the battle, they 
had a division of fresh men to put in to the 
defence, while we, who had suffered more, 
being the attackers, had but a handful with 
which to follow up the success. 

People have said, " But you could have kept 
fresh divisions in reserve as easily as the Turks. 
Why did you not send more men, so as to have 
them ready to follow up a success? " I could 
never answer this question. It is the vital 
question. The cry for " fifty thousand more 
men and plenty of high explosive " went up 
daily from every trench in Gallipoli, and we 
lost the campaign through not sending them in 
time. On the spot of course our generals knew 
that war (like life) consists of a struggle with 



Gallipoli 127 

disadvantages, and their struggle with these 
was a memorable one. Only, when all was 
done, their situation remained that of the Frank 
rearguard in the Song of Roland. In that 
poem the Franks could and did beat the Sara- 
cens, but the Saracens brought up another army 
before the Franks were reinforced. The 
Franks could and did beat that army, too, but 
the Saracens brought up another army before 
the Franks were reinforced. The Franks 
could and did beat that army, too, but then they 
were spent and Roland had to sound his horn 
and Charlemagne would not come to the sum- 
mons of the horn, and the heroes were aban- 
doned in the dolorous pass. 

Summer came upon Gallipoli with a blinding 
heat only comparable to New York in July. 
The flowers which had been so gay with beauty 
in the Helles fields in April soon wilted to 
stalks. The great slope of Cape Helles took 
on a savage and African look of desolation. 
The air quivered over the cracking land. In 
the blueness of the heat haze the graceful ter- 



128 Gallipoli 

rible hills looked even more gentle and beautiful 
than before; and one who was there said that 
" there were little birds that droned, rather 
like the English yellow-hammers." With the 
heat, which was a new experience to all the 
young English soldiers there, came a plague of 
flies beyond all record and belief. Men ate 
and drank flies, the filthy insects were every- 
where. The ground in places was so dark with 
them, that one could not be sure whether the 
patches were ground or flies. Our camps and 
trenches were kept clean; they were well 
scavenged daily; but only a few yards away 
were the Turk trenches, which were invariably 
filthy: there the flies bred undisturbed, perhaps 
encouraged. There Is a fine modern poem 
which speaks of the Indian sun in summer as 
" the blazing death-star." Men In Gallipoli 
in the summer of 19 15 learned to curse the sun 
as an enemy more cruel than the Turk. With 
the sun and the plague of flies came the torment 
of thirst, one of the greatest torments which 
life has the power to inflict. 



Gallipoli 129 

At Cape Helles, in the summer, there was 
a shortage but no great scarcity of water, for 
the Turk wells supplied more than half the 
army and less than half the water needed had 
to be brought from abroad. At Anzac how- 
ever there was always a scarcity, for even in 
the spring not more than a third of the water 
needed could be drawn from wells. At first, 
water could be found by digging shallow pans 
in the beach, but this method failed when the 
heats began. Jwo-thirds (or more) of the 
water needed at Anzac had always to be 
brought from abroad, and to bring this two- 
thirds regularly and to land it and store it under 
shell fire was a difficult task. *' When opera- 
tions were on," as in the August battle, the 
difficulty of distribution was added to the other 
difficulties, and then indeed want of water 
brought our troops to death's door. At Anzac 
'' when operations were on '' even in the in- 
tensest heat the average ration of water for all 
purposes was, perhaps, at most, a pint and a 
half, sometimes only a pint. And though this 



130 GaUipoli 

extremity was as a rule only reached " wTien 
operations were on," when there was heavy 
fighting, it was then that the need was greatest. 

In peace, in comfortable homes, in cool 
weather, civilised people need or consume a 
little less than three pints of liquid in each day. 
In hot weather and when doing severe bodily 
labour they need more; perhaps half a gallon 
in the day. Thirst, which most of us know 
solely as a pleasant zest to drinking, soon be- 
comes a hardship, then, in an hour, an obses- 
sion, and by high noon a madness, to those 
who toil in the sun with nothing to drink. 
Possibly to most of the many thousands who 
were in the Peninsula last summer, the real 
enemies were not the Turks, but the sun in 
Heaven, shaking " the pestilence of his light," 
and thirst that withered the heart and cracked 
the tongue. 

Some have said to me, " Yes, but the Turks 
must have suffered, too, just as much, in that 
waterless ground." It is not so. The Turks 
at Cape Helles held the wells at Krithia; in- 
land from Anzac they held the wells near Lone- 



GalUpoli 131 

some Pine and Koja Dere. They had other 
wells at Maidos, and Gallipoll. They had 
always more water than we, and (what is 
more) the certainty of it. Most of them came 
from lands with little water and great heat, 
ttn (or more) degrees further to the south 
than any part of England. Heat and thirst 
were old enemies to them, they were tempered 
to them. Our men had to serve an apprentice- 
ship to them, and pay for what they learned In 
bodily hardship. Not that our men minded 
hardship; they did not; they were volunteers 
who had chosen their fate and were there of 
their own choice, and no army in the world has 
ever faced suffering more cheerily. But this 
hardship of thirst was a weight upon them, 
throughout the summer; like malaria it did not 
kill, but It lowered all vitality. It halved the 
possible effort of men always too few for the 
work In hand. Let it now double the honour 
paid to them. 

In the sandy soil of the Penmsula were many 
minute amoebae, which played their part in the 



132 Gallipoli 

summer suffering. In the winds of the great 
droughts of July and August the dust blew 
about our positions like smoke from burning 
hills. It fell into food and water and was 
eaten and drunk (like the flies) at each meal. 
Within the human body the amoebae of the sand 
set up symptoms like those of dysentery, as a 
rule slightly less severe than the true dysentery 
of camps. After July, nearly every man in 
our army in Gallipoli, suffered from this evil. 
Like the thirst, it lowered more vitality than 
it destroyed; many died, it is true, but then 
nearly all were ill: It was the universal sickness 
not the occasional death that mattered. 

Pass now to the position of affairs at the 
end of June. We were left to our own strength 
in this struggle, the Turks were shaken : it was 
vital to our chances to attack again before they 
recovered. We had not the men to attack 
again, but they were coming and were due in 
a few weeks' time. While they were on their 
way, the question, how to use them, was con- 
sidered. 



GaUipoli 133 

As the army's task was to help the fleet 
through the Narrows it had to operate in 
the southwestern portion of the Peninsula. 
Further progress against Achi Baba in the 
Helles sector was hardly possible; for the 
Turks had added too greatly to their trenches 
there since the attacks of April and May. 
Operations on the Asian coast were hardly pos- 
sible without a second army; operations against 
Bulair were not likely to help the fleet. Opera- 
tions in the Anzac sector offered better chances 
of success. It was hoped that a thrust south- 
eastward from Anzac might bring our men 
across to the Narrows or to the top of the 
ridges which command the road to Constan- 
tinople. It was reasonable to think that such 
a thrust, backed up by a new landing in force 
to the north, in Suvla Bay, might turn the 
Turkish right and destroy it. If the men at 
Helles attacked, to contain the Turks in the 
south, and the men on the right of Anzac at- 
tacked, to hold the Turks at Anzac, it was 
possible that men on the left of Anzac, backed 



134 Gallipoli 

up by a new force marching from Suvla, might 
give a decisive blow. The Turk position on 
the Peninsula roughly formed a letter L. The 
plan (as it shaped) was to attack the horizon- 
tal line at Cape Helles, press the centre of the 
vertical line at Anzac, and bend back, crumple 
and break the top of the vertical line between 
the Anzac position and Suvla. At the same 
time, Suvla Bay was to be seized and prepared 
as a harbour at which supplies might be landed, 
even in the stormy season. 

Some soldier has said, that " the simple 
thing is the difficult thing." The idea seems 
simple to us, because the difficulty has been 
cleared away for us by another person's hard 
thought. Such a scheme of battle, difficult to 
think out in the strain of holding on and under 
the temptation to go slowly, improving what 
was held, was also difficult to execute. Very 
few of the great battles of history, not even 
those in Russia, in Manchuria, and in the Vir- 
ginian Wilderness have been fought on such 
difficult ground, under such difficult conditions. 

The chosen battlefield (the southwestern 



Gallipoli 135 

end of the Peninsula) has already been de- 
scribed; the greater part of it consists of the 
Cape Helles and Anzac positions, but the vital 
or decisive point, where, if all went well, the 
jTurk right was to be bent back, broken and 
routed, lies to the north of Anzac on the spurs 
and outlying bastions of Sari Bair. 

Suvla Bay, where the new landing was to 
take place, lies three miles to the north of 
Anzac. It is a broad, rather shallow semi- 
circular bay (open to the west and southwest) 
with a partly practicable beach, some of it 
(the southern part) fairly flat and sandy, the 
rest steepish and rocky though broken by 
creeks. Above it, one on the north, one on 
the south horn of the bay, rise two small low 
knolls or hillocks known as Ghazi Baba and 
Lala Baba, the latter a clearly marked tactical 
feature. To the north, beyond the horn of 
the bay, the coast is high, steep-to sandy cliff, 
broken with gullies and washed by deep water, 
but to the south, all the way to Anzac the 
coast is a flat, narrow, almost straight sweep of 
sandy shore shutting a salt marsh and a couple 



136 Gain poll 

of miles of lowland from the sea; it is a lagoon 
beach of the common type, with the usual 
feature of shallow water in the sea that washes 
it. The northern half of this beach is known 
as Beach C, the southern as Beach B. 

Viewed from the sea, the coast chosen for 
the new landing seems comparatively flat and 
gentle, seemingly, though not really, easy to 
land upon, but with no good military position 
near it. It looks as though once, long ago, 
the sea had thrust far inland there, in a big 
bay or harbour stretching from the high ground 
to the north of Suvla to the left of the Anzac 
position. This bay, if it ever existed, must 
have been four miles long and four miles across, 
a very noble space of water, ringed by big, 
broken, precipitous hills, into which it thrust in 
innumerable creeks and combes. Then (pos- 
sibly) in the course of ages, silt brought down 
by the torrents choked the bay, and pushed the 
sea further and further back, till nothing re- 
mained of the harbour but the existing Suvla 
Bay and the salt marsh (dry in summer) . The 
hills ringing Suvla Bay and this flat or slightly 







ft 









AriBurnu 
y^/VZAC COVE 



British Lines 

^K^^ Turkish „ 



ScaJe of Miles 

o A /i •> 1 



GabaTepR 




Map No. 3 



Gallipoli 137 

rising expanse which may once have been a part 
of It, stand (to the fancy) like a rank that has 
beaten back an attack. They are high and 
proud to the north, they stand In groups in the 
centre, but to the south, where they hnk on to 
the broken cliffs of the Anzac position, they 
are heaped In tumbling precipitous disordered 
bulges of hill, cut by every kind of cleft and 
crumpled into every kind of fold, as though 
the dry land had there been put to it to keep 
out the sea. These hills are the scene of the 
bitterest fighting of the battle. 

Although these hills in the Suvla district 
stand in a rank, yet in the centre of the rank 
there are two gaps where the ancient harbour 
of our fancy thrust creeks far inland. These 
gaps or creeks open a little to the south of the 
north and south limits of Suvla Bay. They 
are watered, cultivated valleys with roads or 
tracks in them. In the northern valley Is a 
village of some sixty houses called Anafarta 
Sagir, or Little Anafarta. In the southern 
valley Is a rather larger village of some ninety 
houses called Biyuk Anafarta, or Great An- 



138 Gallipoli 

afarta. The valleys are called after these 
villages. 

Between these valleys Is a big blunt-headed 
jut or promontory of higher ground, which 
thrusts out towards the bay. At the Suvla end 
of this jut, about 1,000 yards from the bight 
of the Salt Marsh, it shoots up in three peaks 
or top knots two of them united in the lump 
called Chocolate Hill, the other known as 
Scimitar Hill or Hill 70; all, roughly, 150 feet 
high. About a mile directly Inland from 
Chocolate Hill Is a peak of about twice the 
height, called Ismail Oglu Tepe, an abrupt and 
savage heap of cliff, dented with chasms, harshly 
scarped at the top, and covered with dense 
thorn scrub. This hill Is the southernmost 
feature In the northern half of the battle-field. 
The valley of Great Anafarta, which runs east 
and west below It, cuts the battle-field in two. 
The southern side of the Great Anafarta 
valley is just that disarrangement of precipitous 
bulged hill which rises and falls In crags, peaks 
and gulleys all the way from the valley to 
Anzac. Few parts of the earth can be more 



Gal lip oil 139 

broken and disjointed than this mass of preci- 
pice, combes and ravines. A savage climate 
has dealt with it since the beginning of time, 
with great heats, frosts and torrents. It Is 
not so much a ridge or chain of hills as the 
manifold outlying bastions and buttresses of 
Sari Bair, from which they are built out In 
craggy bulges parted by ravines. It may be 
said that Sari Bair begins at Gaba Tepe (to the 
south of the Anzac position) and stretches 
thence northeasterly towards Great Anafarta 
in a rolling and confused five miles of hill that 
has all the features of a mountain. It Is not 
high. Its peaks range from about 250 to 600 
feet; its chief peak (Koja Chemen Tepe) Is a 
little more than 900 feet. Nearly all of it is 
trackless, waterless and confused, densely cov- 
ered with scrub (sometimes with forest) lit- 
tered with rocks, an untamed savage country. 
The southwestern half of it made the Anzac 
position, the northeastern and higher half was 
the prize to be fought for. 

It is the watershed of that part of the Penin- 
sula. The gulleys on its south side drain down 



140 Gallipoli 

to the Hellespont; those upon its north side 
drain to the flat land which may once have been 
submerged as a part of Suvla Bay. These 
northern gulleys are great savage irregular 
gashes or glens running westerly or north- 
westerly from the hill bastions. Three of 
them, the three nearest to the northern end of 
the Anzac position, may be mentioned by name : 
Sazli Beit Dere, Chailak Dere, and Aghyl 
Dere. The word Dere means watercourse; 
but all three were bone dry in August when the 
battle was fought. It must be remembered 
that in the trackless Peninsula a watercourse of 
this kind is the nearest approach to a road, and 
(to a military force) the nearest approach to 
a covered way. All these three Deres lead up 
the heart of the hills to those highlands of Sari 
Bair where we wished to plant ourselves. 
From the top of Sari Bair one can look down 
on the whole Turkish position facing Anzac, 
and see that position not only dominated but 
turned and taken in reverse. One can see 
(only three miles away) the only road to Con- 
stantinople, and (five miles away) the little 



Gallipoli 141 

port of Maldos near the Narrows. To us the 
taking of Sari Bair meant the closing of that 
road to the passing of .Turk reinforcements, 
and the opening of the Narrows to the fleet. 
It meant victory, and the beginning of the end 
of this great war, with home and leisure for 
life again, and all that peace means. Knowing 
this, our soldiers made a great struggle for 
Sari Bair, but Fate turned the lot against them. 
Sari was not to be an English hill, though the 
flowers on her sides will grow out of English 
dust forever. Those who lie there thought, as 
they fell, that over their bodies our race would 
pass to victory. It may be that their spirits 
linger there at this moment, waiting for the 
English bugles and the English singing, and the 
sound of the English ships passing up the Hel- 
lespont. 

Among her tumble of hills, from the Anzac 
position to Great Anafarta, Sari Bair thrusts 
out several knolls, peaks and commanding 
heights. Within the Anzac position, is the 
little plateau of Lone or Lonesome Pine to be 
described later. Further to the northeast are 



142 Gain poll 

the heights known as Baby 700 and Battleship 
Hill, and beyond these, still further to the 
northeast, the steep peak of Chunuk Bair. All 
of these before this battle were held by the 
Turks, whose trenches defended them. Lone 
Pine is about 400 feet high, the others rather 
more, slowly rising, as they go northeast, but 
keeping to about the height of the English 
Chilterns. Chunuk Bair, the highest of these, 
is about 750 feet. Beyond Chunuk, half-a-mile 
further to the northeast, is Hill Q, and beyond 
Hill Q a very steep deep gulley, above which 
rises the beautiful peak, the summit of Sari, 
known as Koja Chemen Tepe. One or two 
Irish hills in the wilder parts of Antrim are 
like this peak, though less fleeced with brush. 
In height, as I have said, it Is a little more than 
900 feet, or about the height of our Bredon 
Hill. One point about it may be noted. It 
thrusts out a great spur or claw for rather more 
than a mile due north; this spur, which is much 
gullied, is called Abd-el-Rahman Bair. 

For the moment, Chunuk Bair is the most 
important point to remember, because — 



Gallipoli 143 

(a) It was the extreme right of the pre- 
pared Turk position. 

(b) The three Deres mentioned a couple of 
pages back have their sources at its foot and 
start there, hke three roads starting from the 
walls of a city on their way to the sea. They 
lead past the hills known as Table Top and 
Rhododendron Spur. Close to their begin- 
nings at the foot of Chunuk is a building known 
as The Farm, round which the fighting was 
very fierce. 

The '' idea " or purpose of the battle was 
** to endeavour to seize a position across the 
Gallipoli Peninsular from Gaba Tep to Maidos, 
with a protected line of supply from Suvla 
Bay." 

[The plan of the attack was, that a strong 
force in Anzac should endeavour to throw back 
the right wing of the Turks, drive them south 
towards Kilid Bahr and thus secure a position 
commanding the narrow part of the Peninsula. 

Meanwhile a large body of troops should 
secure Suvla, and another large body, landing 
at Suvla, should clear away any Turkish forces 



144 Gain poll 

on the hills between the Anafarta valleys, and 
then help the attacking force from Anzac by 
storming Sari Bair from the north and west. 

The 6th of August was fixed for the first day 
of the attack from Anzac; the landing at Suvla 
was to take place during the dark hours of 
the night of the 6th-7th. " The 6th was both 
the earliest and the latest date possible for the 
battle, the earliest, because it was the first by 
which the main part of the reinforcements 
would be ready, the latest, because of the 
moon." Both in the preparation and the sur- 
prise of this attack dark nights were essential. 

Sir Ian Hamilton's Despatch (reprinted 
from the London Gazette of Tuesday, the 4th 
January, 19 16) shows that this battle of the 
6th-ioth August was perhaps the strangest and 
most difficult battle ever planned by mortal 
general. It was to be a triple battle, fought 
by three separated armies, not in direct com- 
munication with each other. [There was no 
place from which the battle, as a whole, could 
be controlled, nearer than the island of Imbros, 
(fourteen miles from any part of the Peninsula) 



II 



Gallipoli 145 

to which telegraphic cables led from Anzac and 
Cape Helles. The left wing of our army, de- 
signed for the landing at Suvla, was not only 
not landed, when the battle began, but not con- 
centrated. There was no adjacent subsidiary 
base big enough (or nearly big enough) to hold 
it. *' On the day before the battle, part were 
at Imbros, part at Mudros, and part at Mity- 
lene . . . separated respectively by 14, 60, and 
120 miles of sea from the arena into which 
they were simultaneously to appear." The 
vital part of the fight was to be fought by 
troops from Anzac. The Anzac position was 
an open book to every Turk aeroplane and 
every observer on Sari Balr. The reinforce- 
ments for this part of the battle had to be 
landed in the dark, some days before the 
battle, and kept hidden underground, during 
daylight, so that the Turks should not see them 
and suspect what was being planned. 

In all wars, but especially in modern wars, 
great tactical combinations have been betrayed 
by very little things. In war, as in life, the 
unusual thing, however little, betrays the un- 



146 GaUipoli 

usual thing, however great. An odd bit of 
paper round some cigars betrayed the hopes of 
the American Secession, some litter In the sea 
told Nelson where the French fleet was, one man 
rising up In the grass by a roadside saved the 
wealth of Peru from the hands of Drake. The 
Turks were always expecting an attack from 
Anzac. It is not too much to say that they 
searched the Anzac position hourly for the cer- 
tain signs of an attack, reinforcements and 
supplies. They had not even to search the 
whole position for these signs, since there was 
only one place (towards Fisherman's Hut) 
where they could be put. If they had sus- 
pected that men and stores were being landed, 
they would have guessed at once, that a thrust 
was to be made, and our attacks upon their 
flanks would have met with a prepared defence. 
It was vital to our chance of success that 
nothing unusual, however little, should be 
visible in Anzac from the Turk positions during 
the days before the battle. One man staring 
up at an aeroplane would have been evidence 
enough to a quick observer that there was a 




T3 
O 



Gain poll 147 

new-comer on the scene. One new water tank, 
one new gun, one mule not yet quiet from the 
shock of landing, might have betrayed all the 
adventure. Very nearly thirty thousand men, 
one whole Division and one Brigade of English 
soldiers, and a Brigade of Gurkhas, with their 
guns and stores, had to be landed unobserved 
and hidden. 

There was only one place in which they could 
be hidden, and that was under the ground. 
The Australians had to dig hiding places for 
them before they came. 

In this war of digging, the daily life in the 
trenches gives digging enough to every soldier. 
Men dig daily even if they do not fight. At 
Anzac In July the Australians had a double 
share of digging, their dally share in the front 
lines, and, when that was finished, their nightly 
share, preparing cover for the new troops. 
During the nights of the latter half of July the 
AustraHans at Anzac dug, roofed and covered 
not less than twenty miles of dugouts. All of 
this work was done in their sleep time, after 
the normal day's work of fighting, digging and 



148 Gain poll 

carrying up stores. Besides digging these 
hiding places they carried up, fixed, hid, and 
filled the water tanks which were to supply the 
new-comers. 

On the night of the 3rd of August when the 
landing of the new men began, the work was 
doubled. Everybody who could be spared 
from the front trenches went to the piers to 
help to land, carry inland and hide the guns, 
stores, carts and animals coming ashore. The 
nights, though lengthening, were still summer 
nights. There were seven hours of semi-dark- 
ness in which to cover up all traces of what 
came ashore. The new-comers landed at the 
rate of about 1,500 an hour, during the nights 
of the 3rd, 4th and 5th of August. During 
those nights, the Australians landed, carried 
inland and hid not less than one thousand tons 
of shells, cartridges and food, some hundreds 
of horses and mules, many guns, and two or 
three hundred water-carts and ammunition 
carts. All night-long, for those three nights, 
the Australians worked like schoolboys. 
Often, towards dawn, it was a race against 




a 

-5 



'I'-Qjl 



u 



GallipoU 149 

time, but always at dawn, the night's tally of 
new troops were in their billets, the new stores 
were under ground and the new horses hidden. 
When the morning aeroplanes came over, their 
observers saw nothing unusual In any part of 
Anzac. The half-naked men were going up 
and down the gullies, the wholly naked men 
were bathing in the sea, everything else was as 
it had always been, nor were any transports on 
the coast. For those three nights nearly all the 
Australians at Anzac gave up most of their 
sleep. They had begun the work by digging 
the cover, they took a personal pride and pleas- 
ure in playing the game of cache-cache to the 
end. 

It Is difficult to praise a feat of the kind and 
still more difficult to make people understand 
what the work meant. Those smiling and 
glorious young giants thought little of it. 
They loved their chiefs and they liked the fun, 
and when praised for it looked away with a 
grin. The labour of the task can only be felt 
by those who have done hard manual work in 
hot climates. Digging is one of the hardest 



150 Gain poll 

kinds of work, even when done in a garden with 
a fork. When done in a trench with a pick 
and shovel it is as hard work as threshing with 
a flail. Carrying heavy weights over uneven 
ground is harder work still; and to do either 
of these things on a salt-meat diet with a scanty 
allowance of water, is very, very hard; but to 
do them at night after a hard day's work, in- 
stead of sleeping, is hardest of all; even farm- 
labourers would collapse and sailors mutiny 
when asked to do this last. It may be said 
that no one could have done this labour, but 
splendid young men splendidly encouraged to 
do their best. Many of these same young men 
who had toiled thus almost without sleep for 
three days and nights, fell in with the others 
and fought all through the battle. 

But all this preparation was a setting of prec- 
edents and the doing of something new to war. 
Never before have 25,000 men been kept 
buried under an enemy's eye until the hour for 
the attack. Never before have two Divisions 
of all arms been brought up punctually, by ship, 
over many miles of sea, from different ports. 



Gallipoli 151 

to land under fire, at an appointed time, to 
fulfil a great tactical scheme. 

But all these difficulties were as nothing to 
the difficulty of making sure that the men fight- 
ing in the blinding heat of a Gallipoli August 
should have enough water to drink. Eighty 
tons of water a day does not seem very much. 
It had only to be brought five hundred miles, 
which does not seem very far, to those who in 
happy peace can telephone for 80 tons of any- 
thing to be sent five hundred miles to anywhere. 
But in war, weight, distance and time become 
terrible and tragic things, involving the lives 
of armies. The water supply of that far 
battlefield, indifferent as it was, at the best, was 
a triumph of resolve and skill unequalled yet 
in war. It is said that Wellington boasted 
that, while Napoleon could handle men, he, 
Wellington, could feed them. Our naval 
officers can truly say that, while Sir Ian Hamil- 
ton can handle men, they can give them drink. 

As to the enemy before the battle, it was 
estimated that (apart from the great strategi- 
cal reserves within 30 or 40 miles) there were 



152 Gallipoli 

30,000 Turks in the vital part of the battle- 
field, to the north of Kilid Bahr. Twelve 
thousand of these were in the trenches opposite 
Anzac; most of the rest in the villages two 
or three miles to the south and southeast of 
Sari Bair. Three battalions were in the Anaf- 
arta villages, one battalion was entrenched on 
Ismail Oglu Tepe; small outposts held the two 
Baba hillocks on the bay, and the land north 
of the bay was patrolled by mounted gen- 
darmerie. These scattered troops on the Turk 
right had guns with them; it was not known 
how many. The beach of Suvla was known to 
be mined. 

August began with calm weather. The 
scattered regiments of the Divisions for Suvla, 
after some weeks of hard exercise ashore, were 
sent on board their transports. At a little be- 
fore four o'clock on the afternoon of the 6th 
August, the 29th Division began the battle by 
an assault on the Turk positions below Krithia. 



Roland put the horn to his mouth, gripped it hard 
and with great heart blew it. The hills were high and 
the sound went very far : thirty leagues wide they heard 
it echo. Charles heard it and all his comrades; so the 
King said, *' Our men are fighting." Count Guenes 
answered: ^' If any other said that, I should call him 
a liar." 

Count Roland in pain and woe and great weakness 
blew his horn. The bright blood was running from 
his mouth and the temples of his brains were broken. 
But the noise of the horn was very great. Charles 
heard it as he was passing at the ports; Naimes heard 
it, the Franks listened to it. So the King said, " I 
hear the horn of Roland; he would never sound it if he 
were not fighting." Guenes answered, " There is no 
fighting. You are old and white and hoary. You are 
like a child w^hen you say such things." 

Count Roland's mouth was bleeding; the temples 
of his brain were broken. He blew his horn in weak- 
ness and pain. Charles heard it and his Franks heard 
it. So the King said : " That horn has long breath." 



Duke Naimes answered, " Roland is in trouble. He is 
fighting, on my conscience. Arm yourself. Cry your 
war-cry. Help the men of your house. You hear 
plainly that Roland is in trouble." 

The Emperor made sound his horns. . . . All the 
barons of the army mounted their chargers. But what 
use was that? They had delayed too long. What 
use was that ? It was worth nothing ; they had stayed 
too long; they could not be in time. 

Then Roland said, '' Here we shall receive martyr- 
dom, and now I know well that we have but a moment 
to live. But may all be thieves who do not sell them- 
selves dearly first. Strike, knights, with your bright 
swords; so change your deaths and lives, that sweet 
France be not shamed by us. When Charles comes 
into this field he shall see such discipline upon the 
Saracens that he shall not fail to bless us." 

The Song of Roland. 



The Cape Helles attack, designed to keep the 
Turks to the south of Kilid Bahr from rein- 
forcing those near Anzac, became a very des- 
perate struggle. The Turk trenches there were 
full of men, for the Turks had been preparing 
a strong attack upon ourselves, which we fore- 
stalled by a few hours. The severe fighting 
lasted for a week along the whole Cape Helles 
front, but it was especially bloody and terrible 
In the centre, in a vineyard to the west of the 
Krithia road. It has often happened in war, 
that some stubbornness in attack or defence 
has roused the same quality In the opposer, till 
the honour of the armies seems pledged to the 
taking or holding of one patch of ground, per- 
haps not vital to the battle. It may be that In 
war one resolute soul can bind the excited minds 
of multitudes in a kind of bloody mesmerism; 
but these strange things are not studied as they 
should be. Near Krithia, the battle, which 
began as a containing attack, a minor part of 

155 



156 Gallipoli 

a great scheme, became a furious week-long 
fight for this vineyard, a little patch of ground 
" 200 yards long by 100 yards broad.'* 

From the 6th-i3th of August, the fight for 
this vineyard never ceased. Our Lancashire 
regiments won most of it at the first assault on 
the 6th. For the rest of the week they held 
it against all that the Turks could bring against 
them. It was not a battle in the military text^ 
book sense : it was a fight man to man, between 
two enemies whose blood was up. It was a 
week-long cursing and killing scrimmage, the 
men lying down to fire and rising up to fight 
with the bayonet, literally all day long, day 
after day, the two sides within easy bombing 
distance all the time. The Turks lost some 
thousands of men in their attacks upon this 
vineyard after a week of fighting, they rushed 
it in a night attack, were soon bombed out of 
It and then gave up the struggle for it. This 
bitter fighting not only kept the Turks at Cape 
Helles from reinforcing those at Anzac; it 
caused important Turk reinforcements to be 
sent to the Helles sector. 



Gallipoli 157 

Less than an hour after the 29th Division 
began the containing battle at Krithia, the 
Australians at Anzac began theirs. This, the 
attack on the Turk fort at Lone Pine, in the 
southern half of the Anzac front, was designed 
to keep large bodies of Turks from reinforcing 
their right, on Sari Bair, where the decisive 
blow was to be struck. It was a secondary 
operation, not the main thrust, but it was in 
itself important, since to those at Anzac, the 
hill of Lone Pine was the gate into the nar- 
rowest part of the Peninsula, and through that 
gate, as the Turks very well knew, a rush might 
be made from Anzac upon Maidos and the 
Narrows. Such a thrust from Lone Pine, turn- 
ing all the Turkish works on the range of Sari 
Bair, was what the Turks expected and feared 
from us. They had shewn us as much, quite 
plainly, all through the summer. Any move- 
ment, feint, or demonstration against Lone 
Pine, brought up their reserves at once. It 
was the sensitive spot on their not too strong 
left wing. If we won through there, we had 
their main water supply as an Immediate prize 



158 GallipoU 

and no other position in front of us from 
which we could be held. Any strong attack 
there was therefore certain to contain fully half 
a division of the enemy. 

The hill of Lone or Lonesome Pine is a little 
plateau less than 400 feet high running N. W. 
S. E. and measuring perhaps 250 yards long 
by 200 across. On its southwestern side it 
drops down in gullies to a col or ridge^ known 
as Pine Ridge, which gradually declines away 
to the low ground near Gaba Tepe. On its 
northeastern side it joins the high ground 
known as Johnston's Jolly, which was, alas, 
neither jolly nor Johnston's, but a strong part 
of the Turk position. 

We already held a little of the Lone Pine 
Plateau; our trenches bulged out into it in a 
convexity or salient known as The Pimple, but 
the Turks held the greater part, and their 
trenches curved out the other way, in a mouth, 
concavity or trap opening towards The Pimple 
as though ready to swallow it. [The opposing 
lines of trenches ran from north to south across 
the plateau, with from 50 to 100 yards between 



Gallipoli 159 

them. Both to the north and south of the 
plateau are deep gullies. Just beyond these 
gullies Turk trenches were so placed that the 
machine guns in them could sweep the whole 
plateau. The space between the Australian 
and Turk lines was fairly level hill-top, covered 
with thyme and short scrub. 

For some days before the 6th August the 
warships had been shelling the Turk position 
on Lone Pine to knock away the barbed wire 
in front of it. On the 5th, the Australian 
brigade, told off for the attack, sharpened 
bayonets and prepared their distinguishing 
marks of white bands for the left arms and 
white patches for the backs of their right 
shoulders. In the afternoon of the 6th the 
shelling by the ships became more intense; at 
half-past four it quickened to a very heavy fire ; 
at exactly half-past five it stopped suddenly, 
" the three short whistle blasts sounded and 
were taken up along the line, our men cleared 
the parapet," in two waves on a front of about 
160 yards, " and attacked with vigour." The 
hill top over which they charged was in a night 



1 60 GallipoU 

of smoke and dust from the explosions of the 
shells, and Into that night, already singing with 
enemy bullets, the Australians disappeared. 
They had not gone twenty yards before all that 
dark and blazing hill top was filled with ex- 
plosion and flying missiles from every enemy 
gun. One speaks of a hall of bullets, but no 
hall Is like fire, no hall In a form of death cry- 
ing aloud a note of death, no hail screams as 
it strikes a stone, or stops a strong man In his 
stride. Across that kind of hail the Austral- 
ians charged on Lone Pine. " It was a grim 
kind of steeplechase," said one, " but we meant 
to get to Koja Dere." They reached the 
crumpled wire of the entanglement, and got 
through it to the parapet of the Turk trench, 
where they were held up. Those behind them 
at The Pimple, peering through the darkness, 
to see if any had survived the rush, saw figures 
on the parados of the enemy's trench, and 
wondered what was happening. They sent 
forward the third wave, with one full company 
carrying picks and shovels, to make good what 



Gain poll i6i 

was won. The men of this third wave found 
what was happening. 

The Turkish front line trench was not, like 
most trenches, an open ditch into which men 
could jump, but covered over along nearly all 
Its length with blinders and beams of pinewood, 
heaped with sandbags, and in some places with 
a couple of feet of earth. Under this cover 
the Turks fired at our men through loopholes, 
often with their rifles touching their victims. 
Most of the Australians, after heaving in vain 
to get these blinders up, under a fire that grew 
hotter every instant, crossed them, got into the 
open communication trenches in the rear of the 
[Turk line, and attacked through them; but 
some, working together, hove up a blinder or 
two, and down the gaps so made those brave 
men dropped themselves, to a bayonet fight like 
a rat fight in a sewer, with an enemy whom they 
could hardly see, in a narrow dark gash in the 
earth where they were, at first, as one to Rve 
or seven to ten. 

More and more men dropped down or 



102 Gallipoli 

rushed In from the rear; the Turks so penned 
In, fought hard, but could not beat back the 
attack. They surrendered and were disarmed. 
The survivors were at least as many as their 
captors, who had too much to do at that time 
to send them to the rear, even If there had been 
a safe road by which to send them. They 
were jammed up there In the trenches with the 
Australians, packed man to man, suffering from 
their friends' fire and getting in the way. 

The first thing to be done was to block up the 
communication trenches against the Turkish 
counter attack. Every man carried a couple of 
sandbags, and with these, breastworks and 
walls were built. Their work was done in a 
narrow dark sweltering tunnel, heaped with 
corpses and wounded and crowded with prison- 
ers who might at any moment have risen. Al- 
ready the Turks had begun their counter at- 
tacks. At every other moment a little rush of 
Turks came up the communication trenches, 
flung their bombs In the workers' faces, and 
were bayoneted as they threw. The trenches 
curved and zigzagged in the earth; the men In 



i^^/-^ 










.^. 








Inside an Australian trench, showing a man using a periscope rifle 
and another man keeping watch by means of a periscope 



Gallipoli 163 

one section could neither see nor hear what the 
men In the nearest sections were doing. What 
went on under the ground there in the making 
good of those trenches will never be known. 
From half-past five till midnight every section of 
the line was searched by bombs and bullets, by 
stink pots, and sticks of dynamite, by gas-bombs 
and a falling tumult of shell and shrapnel, 
which only ceased to let some rush of Turks 
attack, with knives, grenades and bayonets, 
hand to hand and body to body in a blackness 
like the darkness of a mine. At midnight the 
wounded were lying all over the trenches, the 
enemy dead were so thick that our men had to 
walk on them, and bombs were falling In such 
numbers that every foot In those galleries was 
stuck with human flesh. No man slept that 
night. At half-past seven next morning (the 
7th) a small quantity of bread and tea was 
rushed across the plateau to the fighters, who 
had more than earned their breakfast. Turk 
shell had by this time blown up some of the 
head-cover and some of the new communication 
trenches were still only a few feet deep. A 



1 64 Gallipoli 

Colonel passing along one of them told an 
officer that his section of the trench was too 
shallow. Half-an-hour later, in passing back, 
he found the officer and three men blown to 
pieces by a shell; in a few minutes more he was 
himself killed. At noon the bombing became 
so severe that some sections of the line were 
held only by one or two wounded men. At one 
o'clock the enemy attacked furiously with bomb 
and bayonet, in great force. They came on in 
a mass, in wave after wave, shoulder to 
shoulder, heads down, shouting the name of 
God. They rushed across the plateau, jumped 
into the trenches and were mixed up with our 
men in a hand-to-hand fight, which lasted for 
five hours. Not many of them could join in 
the fight at one time, and not many of them 
went back to the Turk lines; but they killed 
many of our men, and when their last assault 
failed our prize was very weakly held. At 
half-past seven the survivors received a cheer- 
ing (and truthful) message from the Brigadier 
" that no fighters can surpass Australians,'' and 
almost with the message came another Turk 



Gallipoli 165 

assault begun by bomb and shell and rifle fire, 
and followed by savage rushes with the bayonet, 
one of which got In, and did much slaughter. 
No man slept that night; the fight hardly 
slackened all through the night; at dawn the 
dead were lying three deep in every part of the 
line. Bombs fell every minute in some section 
of the line, and where the wide Turk trenches 
had been blasted open they were very destruc- 
tive. The men were " extremely tired but de- 
termined to hold on." They did hold on. 

They held on for the next five days and 
nights, till Lone Pine was ours past question. 
For those five days and nights the fight for 
Lone Pine was one long personal scrimmage in 
the midst of explosion. For those five days 
and nights the Australians lived and ate and 
slept in that gallery of the mine of death, in a 
half darkness lit by great glares, in filth, heat 
and corpses, among rotting and dying and mu- 
tilated men, with death blasting at the doors 
only a few feet away, and intense and bloody 
fighting, hand to hand, with bombs, bayonets 
and knives, for hours together by night and 



1 66 Gain poll 

day. When the Turks gave up the struggle 
the dead were five to the yard in that line or 
works; they were heaped in a kind of double 
wall all along the sides of the trench: most of 
them were bodies of Turks, but among them 
were one quarter of the total force which ran 
out from The Pimple on the evening of the 6th. 

Like the fight for the vineyard near Krithia, 
this fight for Lone Pine kept large numbers 
of Turks from the vital part of the battlefield. 

When the sun set upon this battle at Lone 
Pine on that first evening of the 6th of August, 
many thousands of brave men fell in for the 
main battle, which was to strew their glorious 
bodies in the chasms of the Sari Bair, where 
none but the crows would ever find them. They 
fell in at the appointed places in four columns, 
two to guard the flanks, two to attack. One 
attacking column, guarded and helped by the 
column on its right, was to move up the Chailak 
and Sazli Beit Deres, to the storm of Chunuk 
Bair, the other attacking column, guarded and 
helped by the column on its left, was to move 
up the Aghyl Dere to the storm of Sari's peak 



Gallipoli 16^ 

of Koja Chemen Tepe. The outermost, left, 
guarding column (though it did not know it) 
was to link up with the force soon to land at 
Suvla. 

They were going upon a night attack in a 
country known to be a wilderness with neither 
water nor way in it. They had neither light 
nor guide, nor any exact knowledge of where 
the darkness would burst into a blaze from the 
Turk fire. Many armies have gone out into 
the darkness of a night adventure, but what 
army has gone out like this, from the hiding 
places on a beach to the heart of unknown hills, 
to wander up crags under fire, to storm a for- 
tress in the dawn? Even in Manchuria, there 
were roads and the traces and the comforts of 
man. In this savagery, there was nothing, but 
the certainty of desolation, where the wounded 
would lie until they died and the dead be never 
buried. 

Until this campaign, the storm of Badajos 
was the most desperate duty ever given to 
British soldiers. The men in the forlorn hope 
of that storm marched to their position to the 



1 68 Gallipoli 

sound of fifes " which filled the heart with a 
melting sweetness " and tuned that rough com- 
pany to a kind of sacred devotion. No music 
played away the brave men from Anzac. 
They answered to their names in the dark, and 
moved off to take position for what they had 
to do. Men of many races were banded 
together there. There were Australians, Eng- 
lish, Indians, Maoris and New Zealanders, 
made one by devotion to a cause, and all will- 
ing to die that so their comrades might see the 
dawn make a steel streak of the Hellespont 
from the peaked hill now black against the 
stars. Soon they had turned their back on 
friendly little Anzac and the lights in the gul- 
lies and were stepping out with the sea upon 
their left and the hills of their destiny upon 
their right, and the shells, starhghts and battle 
of Lone Pine far away behind them. Before 
9 A. M. the Right Covering Column (of New 
Zealanders) was in position ready to open up 
the Sazli Beit and Challak Deres, to their 
brothers who were to storm Chunuk. Half an 



Gallipoli 169 

hour later, cunningly backed by the guns of the 
destroyer Colne, they rushed the Turk position, 
routed the garrison and its supports, and took 
the fort known as Old No. 3 Post. It was an 
immensely strong position, protected by barbed 
wire, shielded by shell-proof head cover, and 
mined in front " with 28 mines electrically con- 
nected to a first-rate firing apparatus within." 
Sed nisi Dominus. 

This success opened up the Sazli Dere for 
nearly half of its length. 

Inland from Old No. 3 Post, and some 700 
yards from it is a crag or precipice which looks 
like a round table, with a top projecting beyond 
its legs. This crag, known to our men as 
Table Top, is a hill which few would climb for 
pleasure. Nearly all the last 100 feet of the 
peak is precipice, such as no mountaineer would 
willingly climb without clear daylight and every 
possible precaution. It is a sort of skull of 
rock fallen down upon its body of rock, and 
the great rocky ribs heave out with gullies be- 
tween them. The table-top, or plateau-summit. 



1 70 Gallipoli 

was strongly entrenched and held by the Turks, 
whose communication trenches ran down the 
back of the hill to Rhododendron Spur. 

While their comrades were rushing Old No. 
3 Post, a. party of New Zealanders marched to 
storm this natural fortress. The muscular 
part of the feat may be likened to the climbing 
of the Welsh Glyddyrs, the Irish Lurig, or the 
craggier parts of the American Palisades, in 
a moonless midnight, under a load of not less 
than thirty pounds. But the muscular effort 
was made much greater by the roughness of the 
unknown approaches, which led over glidders 
of loose stones into the densest of short, thick, 
intensely thorny scrub. The New Zealanders 
advanced under fire through this scrub, went 
up the rocks in a spirit which no crag could 
daunt, reached the Table-top, rushed the Turk 
trenches, killed some Turks of the garrison and 
captured the rest with all their stores. 

This success opened up the remainder of the 
Sazli Beit Dere. 

While these attacks were progressing, the 
remainder of the Right Covering Column 



Gallipoli 171 

marched north to the Chailak Dere. A large 
body crossed this Dere and marched on, but the 
rest turned up the Dere and soon came to a 
barbed wire entanglement which blocked the 
ravine. They had met the Turks' barbed wire 
before, on Anzac Day, and had won through 
it, but this wire in the Dere was new to their 
experience; it was meant rather as a permanent 
work than as an obstruction. It was secured 
to great balks or blinders of pine, six or eight 
feet high, which stood in a rank twenty or 
thirty deep right across the ravine. The wire 
which crossed and criss-crossed between these 
balks was as thick as a man's thumb and pro- 
fusely barbed. Beyond it lay a flanking trench, 
held by a strong outpost of Turks, who at once 
opened fire. This, though not unexpected, was 
a difficult barrier to come upon in the darkness 
of a summer night, and here, as before, at the 
landing of the Worcester Regiment at W beach, 
men went forward quietly, without weapons, to 
cut the wire for the others. They were shot 
down, but others took their places, though the 
Turks, thirty steps away on the other side of 



172 Gal lip oil 

the gulley, had only to hold their rifles steady 
and pull their triggers to destroy them. This 
holding up in the darkness by an unseen hidden 
enemy and an obstacle which needed high ex- 
plosive shell in quantity caused heavy loss and 
great delay. For a time there was no getting 
through; but then with the most desperate 
courage and devotion, a party of engineers 
cleared the obstacle, the Turks were routed, 
and a path made for the attackers. 

This success opened up the mouth of the 
Chailak Dere. 

Meanwhile those who had marched across 
this Dere and gone on towards Suvla, swung 
round to the right to clear the Turks from 
Bauchop's Hill, which overlooks the Chailak 
Dere from the north. Bauchop's Hill (a 
rough country even for Gallipoli) is cleft by 
not less than twenty great gullies, most of them 
forked, precipitous, overgrown and heaped with 
rocks. The New Zealanders scrambled up it 
from the north, got into a maze of trenches, 
not strongly held, beat the Turks out of them, 
wandered south across the neck or ridge of the 



GalHpoli 173 

hill, discovering Turk trenches by their fire, and 
at last secured the whole hill. 

This success, besides securing the Chailak 
Dere from any assault from the north, secured 
the south flank of the Aghyl Dere beyond it. 

Meanwhile the Left Covering Column 
(mainly Welshmen) which for some time had 
halted at Old No. 3 Post, waiting for the 
sound of battle to tell them that the Turks on 
Bauchop's Hill were engaged, marched boldly 
on the Aghyl Dere, crossed it in a rush, taking 
every Turk trench in the way, then stormed the 
Turk outpost on Damakjelik Bair, going on 
from trench to trench in the dark guided by the 
flashes of the rifles, till the whole hill was theirs. 
This success opened up the Aghyl Dere to the 
attacking column. 

As {he troops drew their breath In the still 
night on the little hill which they had won, they 
heard about three miles away a noise of battle 
on the seacoast to their left. This noise was 
not the nightly " hate " of the monitors and 
destroyers but an irregular and growing rifle 
fire. This, though they did not know it, was 



174 Gallipoli 

the beginning of the landing of the new Divi- 
sions, with their 30,000 men, at Suvla Bay. 

For the moment, Suvla was not the important 
point in the battle. The three Deres were the 
important points, for up the three Deres, now 
cleared of Turks, our Attacking Columns were 
advancing to the assault. 

By this time however, the Turks were roused 
throughout their line. All the Anzac position 
from Tasmania Post to Table Top was a blaze 
of battle to contain them before our trenches, 
but they knew now that their right was threat- 
ened and their reserves were hurrying out to 
meet us before we had gained the crests. Our 
Right Attacking Column (of English and New 
Zealand troops) went up the Sazli Belt and 
Challak Deres, deployed beyond Table Top 
and stormed Rhododendron Spur, fighting for 
their lives every inch of the way. The Left 
Column (mainly Indians and Australians) 
pressed up the Aghyl, into the stony clefts of 
its upper forks, and so, by rock, jungle, heart- 
breaking cliff and fissure to the attack of Hill 
Q, and the lower slopes of Sari. They, too, 



Gallipoli 175 

were fighting for their hves. Their advance 
was across a scrub peopled now by little clumps 
of marksmen firing from hiding. When they 
deployed out of the Deres, to take up their 
line of battle, they linked up with the Right 
Assaulting Column, and formed with them a 
front of about a mile, stretching from the old 
Anzac position to within a mile of the crests 
which were the prize. By this time the night 
was over, day was breaking, the Turks were 
in force, and our attacking columns much ex- 
hausted, but there was still breath for a last 
effort. Now, with the breath, came a quick 
encouragement, for looking down from their 
hillsides they could see Suvla Bay full of ships, 
the moving marks of boats, dotted specks of 
men on the sandhills, and more ships on the 
sea marching like chariots to the cannon. In 
a flash, as happens when many minds are tense 
together, they realised the truth. A new land- 
ing was being made. All along the coast by 
the Bay the crackle and the flash of firing was 
moving from the sea, to shew them that the 
landing was made good, and that the Turks 



176 Gallipoli 

were falling back. Hardening their hearts at 
this sight of help coming from the sea the Aus- 
tralians and Sikhs with the last of their strength 
went at Koja Chemen Tepe, and the New Zea- 
landers upon their right rose to the storm of 
Chunuk. 

It was not to be. The guns behind them 
backed them. They did what mortal men 
could do, but they were worn out by the night's 
advance, they could not carry the two summits. 
They tried a second time to carry Chunuk; but 
they were too weary and the Turks in too great 
strength; they could not get to the top. But 
they held to what they had won ; they entrenched 
themselves on the new line, and there they 
stayed, making ready for the next attack. 

Two or three have said to me: "They 
ought not to have been exhausted; none of them 
had marched five miles." It is difficult to 
answer such critics patiently, doubly difficult to 
persuade them, without showing them the five 
miles. There comes into my mind, as I write, 
the image of some hills in the west of Ireland, 
a graceful and austere range, not difficult to 



Gallipoli 177 

climb, seemingly, and not unlike these Gallipoli 
hills, in their look of lying down at rest. The 
way to those hills is over some miles of scat- 
tered limestone blocks, with gaps between them 
full of scrub, gorse, heather, dwarf-ash and 
little hill-thorn, and the traveller proceeds, as 
the Devil went through Athlone, " in standing 
lepps." This journey to the hills is the likest 
journey (known to me) to that of the assault- 
ing columns. Like the Devil in Athlone the 
assaulting columns had often to advance " in 
standing lepps," but to them the standing lepp 
came as a solace, a rare, strange and blessed 
respite, from forcing through scrub by main 
strength, or scaling a crag of rotten sandstone, 
in pitch darkness, in the presence of an enemy. 
For an armed force to advance a mile an hour 
by day over such a country is not only good 
going, but a great achievement; to advance four 
miles in a night over such a country, fighting 
literally all the way, often hand to hand, and 
to feel the enemy's resistance stiffening and his 
reserves arriving, as the strength fails and the 
ascent steepens, and yet to make an effort at 



lyS Gallipoli 

the end, Is a thing unknown in the history of 
war. And this first fourteen hours of exhaust- 
ing physical labour was but the beginning. 
The troops, as they very well knew, were to 
have two or three days more of the same toil 
before the battle could be ended, one way or 
the other. So after struggling for fourteen 
hours with every muscle in their bodies, over 
crags and down gullies in the never-ceasing 
peril of death, they halted in the blaze of noon 
and drew their breath. In the evening, as they 
hoped, the men from Suvla would join hands 
and go on to victory with them; they had fought 
the first stage of the battle, the next stage was 
to be decisive. 

The heat of this noon of August 7th on 
those sandy hills was a scarcely bearable tor- 
ment. 

Meanwhile, at Suvla, the left of the battle, 
the nth Division, had landed In the pitch-dark- 
ness, by wading ashore, in five feet of water, 
under rifle fire, on to beaches prepared with 
land mines. The first boat-loads lost many 



Gallipoli 179 

men from the mines and from the fire of snipers, 
who came right down to the beach in the dark- 
ness and fired from the midst of our men. 
These snipers were soon bayoneted, our men 
formed for the assault in the dark and stormed 
the Turk outpost on Lala Baba there and then. 
While Lala Baba was being cleared other bat- 
talions moved north to clear the Turk from 
the neighbourhood of the beach on that side. 
The ground over which they had to move is a 
sand-dune-land, covered with gorse and other 
scrub, most difficult to advance across in a wide 
extension. About half a mile from the beach 
the ground rises in a roll of whale-back, known 
on the battle plans as Hill 10. This hill is 
about three hundred yards long and thirty feet 
high. At this whale-back (which was en- 
trenched) the Turks rallied on their supports; 
they had, perhaps, a couple of thousand men 
and (some say) a gun or two, and the dawn 
broke before they could be rushed. Their first 
shells upon our men set fire to the gorse, so 
that our advance against them was through a 
blazing common in which many men who fell 



i8o Gallipoli 

wounded were burnt to death or suffocated. 
The Turks, seeing the difficulties of the men 
in the fire, charged with the bayonet, but were 
themselves charged and driven back in great 
disorder; the fire spread to their hill and 
burned them out of it. Our men then began to 
drive the Turks away from the high ridges to 
the north of Suvla. The loth Division began 
to land while this fight was still in progress. 
This early fighting had won for us a landing- 
place at Suvla and had cleared the ground to 
the north of the bay for the deployment for the 
next attack. This was to be a swinging round 
of two Brigades to the storm of the hills di- 
rectly to the east of the Salt Lake. Jhese hills 
are the island-like double-peaked Chocolate 
Hill (close to the lake) and the much higher 
and more important hills of Scimitar Hill (or 
Hill 70) and Ismail Oglu Tepe (Hill 100) 
behind it. The Brigade chosen for this attack 
were the 31st (consisting of Irish Regiments) 
belonging to the loth Division, and the 32nd 
(consisting of Yorkshire and North of Eng- 
land Regiments) belonging to the nth Divi- 



Gallipoli i8i 

sion. The 32nd had been hotly engaged since 
the very early morning, the 31st were only just 
on shore. The storm was to be pushed from 
the north, and would, if successful, clear the 
way for the final thrust, the storm of Koja- 
Chemen Tepe from the northwest. 

This thrust from Suvla against Koja Chemen 
was designed to complete and make decisive the 
thrust already begun by the Right and Left At- 
tacking Columns. The attack on Chocolate 
Hill, Scimitar Hill and Ismail Oglu was to 
make that thrust possible by destroying forever 
the power of the Turk to parry it. The Turk 
could only parry it by firing from those hills 
on the men making It. It was therefore neces- 
sary to seize those hills before the Turk could 
stop us. If the Turks seized those hills be- 
fore us, or stopped us from seizing them, our 
troops could not march from Suvla to take part 
in the storm of Koja Chemen. If we seized 
them before the Turks, then the Turks could 
not stop us from crossing the valley to that 
storm. The first problem at Suvla therefore 
was not so much to win a battle as to win a 



1 82 GaUipoli 

race with the Turks for the possession of those 
hills; the winning of the battle could be ar- 
ranged later. Our failure to win that race 
brought with it our loss of the battle. The 
next chapter In the story of the battle is simply 
a description of the losing of a race by loss of 
time. 

Now the giving of praise or blame is always 
easy, but the understanding of anything is diffi- 
cult. The understanding of anything so vast, 
so confused, so full of contradiction, so depend- 
ent on little things (themselves changing from 
minute to minute, the coward of a moment ago 
blazing out into a hero at the next turn) as a 
modern battle is more than difficult. But 
some attempt must be made to understand how 
it came about that time was lost at Suvla, be- 
tween the landing, at midnight on the 6th-7th 
August, and the arrival of the Turks upon the 
hills, at midnight on the 8th-9th. 

In the first place it should be said that the 
beaches of Suvla are not the beaches of sea- 
side resorts, all pleasant smooth sand and 
shingle. They are called beaches because they 



Gallipoli 183 

cannot well be called cliffs. They slope into 
the sea with some abruptness, in pentes of rock 
and tumbles of sand-dune difficult to land upon 
from boats. From them, one climbs onto sand- 
dune, into a sand-dune land, which is like noth- 
ing so much as a sea-marsh from which the 
water has receded. Walking on this soft sand 
is difficult, it is like walking in feathers; work- 
ing, hauling and carrying upon it is very diffi- 
cult Upon this coast and country, roadless, 
wharfless, beachless and unimproved, nearly 
30,000 men landed in the first ten hours of 
August 7th. At 10 A.M., on that day, when 
the sun was In his stride, the difficulty of those 
beaches began to tell on those upon them. 
There had been sharp fighting on and near the 
beaches, and shells were still falling here and 
there in all the ground which we had won. 
On and near the beaches there was a congestion 
of a very hindering kind. With men coming 
ashore, shells bursting among them, mules 
landing, biting, kicking, shying and stamped- 
ing, guns limbering up and trying to get out 
Into position, more men coming ashore or seek- 



184 Gallipoli 

ing for the rest of their battalion in a crowd 
where all battalions looked alike, shouts, or- 
ders and counter-orders, ammunition boxes be- 
ing passed along, water carts and transport be- 
ing started for the firing line, wounded coming 
down or being helped down, or being loaded 
into lighters, doctors trying to clear the way for 
field dressing stations, with every now and then 
a shell from Ismail sending the sand in clouds 
over corpses, wounded men and fatigue parties, 
and a blinding August sun over all to exhaust 
and to madden, it was not possible to avoid con- 
gestion. This congestion was the first, but not 
the most fatal cause of the loss of time. 

Though the congestion was an evil in itself. 
Its first evil effect was that it made it impossi- 
ble to pass orders quickly from one part of the 
beach to another. In this first matter of the 
attack on the hills, the way had been opened for 
the assault by 10 A. M. at the latest but to get 
through the confusion along the beaches 
(among battalions landing, forming and defil- 
ing, and the waste of wounded momently in- 
creasing) to arrange for the assault and to 



Gallipoli 185 

pass the orders to the battalions named for the 
duty, took a great deal of time. It was nearly 
I P. M. when the 31st moved north from Lala 
Baba on their march round the head of the Salt 
Lake Into position for the attack. The 32nd 
Brigade, having fought since dawn at Hill 10, 
was already to the north of the Salt Lake, but 
when (at about 3 P. M.) the 31st took position, 
facing southeast, with its right on the north- 
east corner of the Salt Lake, the 32nd was not 
upon Its left ready to advance with it. In- 
stead of that guard upon its left the 31st found 
a vigorous attack of Turks. More time was 
lost, waiting for support to reach the left, and 
before it arrived, word game that the attack 
upon the hills was to be postponed till after 
5 P. M. Seeing the danger of delay and that 
Chocolate Hill at least should be seized at 
once, the Brigadier General (Hill) telephoned 
for supports and covering fire, held off the at- 
tack on his left with one battalion, and with the 
rest of his Brigade started at once to take 
Chocolate Hill, cost what it might. The men 
went forward and stormed Chocolate Hill, the 



1 86 Gallipoli 

7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers bearing the brunt of 
the storm. 

At some not specified time, perhaps after this 
storm, in a general retirement of the Turks, 
Hill 70, or Scimitar Hill, was abandoned to us, 
and occupied by an English battalion. 

During all this day of the 7th of August all 
our men suffered acutely from the great heat 
and from thirst. Several men went raving 
mad from thirst, others assaulted the water 
guards, pierced the supply hoses, or swam to 
the lighters to beg for water. Thirst in great 
heat is a cruel pain, and this (afflicting some 
regiments more than others) demoralised some 
and exhausted all. Efforts were made to send 
up and to find water; but the distribution sys- 
tem, beginning on a cluttered beach and end- 
ing in a rough, unknown country full of con- 
fused fighting and firing, without anything like 
a road, and much of it blazing or smouldering 
from the scrub fires, broke down, and most of 
the local wells, when discovered, were filled 
with corpses put there by the Turk garrison. 
Some unpolluted wells of drinkable, though 



Gallipoli 187 

brackish water, were found, but most of these 
were guarded by snipers, who shot at men go- 
ing to them. Many men were killed thus and 
many more wounded, for the Turk snipers were 
good shots, cleverly hidden. 

All through the day In the Suvla area, thirst, 
due to the great heat, was another cause of loss 
of time In the fulfilment of that part of the 
tactical scheme; but it was not the final and 
fatal cause. 

Chocolate Hill was taken by our men (now 
utterly exhausted by thirst and heat) just as 
darkness fell. They were unable to go on 
against Ismail Oglu Tepe. They made their 
dispositions for the night on the line they had 
won, sent back to the beaches for ammuni- 
tion, food and water, and tried to forget their 
thirst. They were in bad case, and still two 
miles from the Australians below Koja Chemen 
Tepe. Very late that night word reached them 
that the Turks were massed in a gulley to their 
front, that no other enemy reserves were any- 
where visible, and that the Turks had with- 
drawn their guns, fearing that they would be 



1 88 Gallipoli 

taken next morning. Before dawn on the all- 
important day of the 8th August, our men at 
Suvla after a night of thirst and sniping, stood 
to arms to help out the vital thrust of the 
battle. 

Had time not been lost on the 7th, their task 
on the 8th would have been to cross the valley 
at dawn, join the Australians and go with them 
up the spurs to victory, in a strength which the 
Turks could not oppose. At dawn on the 8th 
their path to the valley was still barred by the 
uncaptured Turk fort on Ismail; time had been 
lost; there could be no crossing the valley till 
Ismail was taken. There was still time to take 
it and cross the valley to the storm, but the 
sands were falling. Up on Chunuk already 
the battle had begun without them; no time was 
lost on Chunuk. 

Up on Chunuk at that moment a very bitter 
battle was being fought. On the right, on 
Chunuk itself, the Gloucester and New Zea- 
land Regiments were storming the hill, in the 
centre and on the left the Australians, English, 
and Indians were trying for Hill Q and the 



GaUipoli 189 

south of Koja Chemen. They had passed the 
night on the hillsides under a never-ceasing fire 
of shells and bullets, now, before dawn, they 
were making a terrible attempt. Those on 
Chunuk went up with a rush, pelted from in 
front and from both flanks by every engine of 
death. The Gloucesters were on the left and 
the New Zealanders on the right in this great 
assault. They deployed past The Farm and 
then went on to the storm of a hill which rises 
some four hundred feet in as many yards. 
They were on the top by dawn; Chunuk Bair, 
the last step, but one, to victory, was ours and 
remained ours all day, but at a cost which few 
successful attacks have ever known. By four 
o'clock that afternoon the New Zealanders had 
dwindled to three officers and fifty men, and 
the Gloucester battalion, having lost every ofli- 
cer and senior non-commissioned officer, was 
fighting under section-leaders and privates. 
Still, their attack had succeeded; they were con- 
querors. In the centre the attack on Hill Q 
was less successful. There the English and 
Indian regiments, assaulting together, were 



190 Gallipoli 

held; the Turks were too strong. Our men 
got up to the top of the lower spurs, and there 
had to lie down and scrape cover, for there was 
no going further. On the left of our attack the 
Australians tried to storm the Abd-el-Rahman 
Bair from the big gulley of Asma Dere. They 
went up in the dark with Australian dash to a 
venture pretty desperate even for Gallipoli. 
The Turks held the high ground on both sides 
of the Asma gulley, and were there In great 
force with many machine guns. The Austral- 
ians were enfiladed, held In front, and taken In 
reverse, and (as soon as It was light enough 
for the Turks to see) they suffered heavily. 
As one of the Australians has described It: 
"The 14th and 15th Battalions moved out In 
single file and deployed to the storm and an 
advance was made under heavy rifle and ma- 
chine gun fire. After the 15th Battalion had 
practically withered away, the 14th continued 
to advance, suffering heavily, and the Turks In 
great force. As we drove them back, they 
counter attacked, several times. The Bat- 



GalUpoli 191 

talion thus got very split up and it is impossible 
to say exactly what happened." 

It is now possible to say exactly that that 
14th Battalion fought like heroes in little bands 
of wounded and weary men, and at last, with 
great reluctance, on repeated orders, fell back 
to the Asma Dere from which they had come, 
beating off enemy attacks all the way down the 
hill, and then held on, against all that the Turk 
could do. 

By noon, this assault, which would have been 
decisive had the men from Suvla been engaged 
with the Australians, was at an end. Its right 
had won Chunuk, and could just hold on to 
what it had won, its centre was held, and its 
left driven back. The fire upon all parts of 
the line was terrific; our men were lying (for 
the most part) in scratchlngs of cover, for they 
could not entrench under fire so terrible. Often 
in that rough and tumble country, the snipers 
and bombers of both sides, were within a few 
yards of each other, and in the roar and blast 
of the great battle were countless little battles, 



192 Gallipoli 

or duels to the death, which made the ground 
red and set the heather on fire. Half of the 
hills of that accursed battlefield, too false of 
soil to be called crags and too savage with 
desolation to be called hills, such as feed the 
sheep and bees of England, were blazing in 
sweeps of flame, which cast up smoke to heaven, 
and swept in great swathes across the gullies. 
Shells from our ships were screaming and burst- 
ing among all that devil's playground; it was an 
anxious time for the Turks. Many a time 
throughout that day the Turkish officers must 
have looked down anxiously upon the Suvla 
plain to see if our men there were masters of 
Ismail and on the way to Koja Chemen. For 
the moment, as they saw, we were held; but not 
more than held. With a push from Suvla to 
help us, we could not be held. Our men on the 
hills, expecting that helping push, drew breath 
for a new assault. 

It was now noon. The battle so far was In 
our favour. We had won ground, some of it 
an all-important ground, and for once we had 
the Turks with their backs against the wall and 



Gallipoli 193 

short of men. At Helles they were pressed, at 
Lone Pine they were threatened at the heart, 
under Koja Chemen the knife point was touch- 
ing the heart, and at Suvla was the new strength 
to drive the knife point home and begin the 
end of the war. And the Turks could not stop 
that new strength. Their nearest important 
reserve of men was at Eski Kevi, ten miles away 
by a road which could scarcely be called a goat 
track, and these reserves had been called on 
for the fight at Krithia, and still more for the 
two days of struggle at Lone Pine. All 
through that day of the eighth of August Fate 
waited to see what would happen between Suvla 
and Koja Chemen. She fingered with her dice 
uncertain which side to favour; she waited to 
be courted by the one who wanted her. Eight 
hours of daylight had gone by, but there was 
still no moving forward from Suvla, to seize 
Ismail and pass from it across the valley to the 
storm. Noon passed into the afternoon, but 
there was still no movement. Four hours 
more went by, and now our aeroplanes brought 
word that the Turks near Suvla were moving 



194 Gallipoli 

back their guns by ox-teams, and that their foot 
were on the march, coming along their break- 
neck road, making perhaps a mile an hour, but 
marching and drawing steadily nearer to the 
threatened point. The living act of the battle 
was due at Ismail: from Ismail the last act, the 
toppling down of the Turk forever among the 
bones of his victims and the ruin of his ally, 
would have been prepared and assured. There 
was a desultory fire around Ismail, and the 
smoke of scrub fires which blazed and smoul- 
dered everywhere as far as the eye could see, 
but no roar and blaze and outcry of a meant 
attack. The battle hung fire on the left, the 
hours were passing, the Turks were coming. 
It was only five o'clock still; we had still seven 
hours or more. In the centre we had almost 
succeeded. We could hang on there and try 
again, there was still time. The chance which 
had been plainly ours, was still an even chance. 
It was for the left to seize it for us, the battle 
waited for the left, the poor, dying Gloucesters 
and Wellingtons hung on to Chunuk for it, the 
Gurkhas and English in the trampled corn- 



Gallipoli 195 

fields near The Farm died where they lay on 
the chance of It, the Australians on Abd-el- 
Rahman held steady in the hope of it, under 
a fire that filled the air. 

If, as men say, the souls of a race, all the 
company of a nation's dead, rally to the liv- 
ing of their people In a time of storm, those 
fields of hell below Koja Chemen, won by the 
sweat and blood and dying agony of our thou- 
sands, must have answered with a ghostly 
muster of English souls in the afternoon of that 
eighth of August. There was the storm, there 
was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which 
this death and mangling and dying misery and 
exultation had led. Then was the hour for a 
casting off of self, and a setting aside of every 
pain and longing and sweet affection, a giving 
up of all that makes a man to be something 
which makes a race, and a going forward to 
death resolvedly to help out their brothers high 
up above In the shell bursts and the blazing 
gorse. Surely all through the eighth of August 
our unseen dead were on that field, blowing the 
horn of Roland, the unheard, unheeded horn, 



196 Gain poll 

the horn of heroes in the dolorous pass, asking 
for the little that heroes ask, but asking in vain. 
If ever the great of England cried from be- 
yond death to the living they cried then. " De 
qo qui calt. Demuret i unt trop." 

All through the morning of that day, the 
Commander-in-Chief, on watch at his central 
station, had waited with growing anxiety for the 
advance from the Suvla Beaches. Till the aft- 
ernoon the critical thrust on Chunuk and the 
great Turk pressure at Lone Pine made it im- 
possible for him to leave his post to intervene, 
but, in the afternoon, seeing that neither wire- 
less nor telephone messages could take the 
place of personal vision and appeal, he took 
the risk of cutting himself adrift from the main 
conflict, hurried to Suvla, landed, and found 
the great battle of the war, that should have 
brought peace to all that Eastern world, being 
lost by minutes before his eyes. 

Only one question mattered then: '* Was 
there still time? " Had the Turks made good 
their march and crowned those hills, or could 
our men forestall them? It was now doubt- 



GaUipoU 197 

ful, but the point was vital, not only to the 
battle, but to half the world In travail. It had 
to be put to the test. A hundred years ago, 
perhaps even fifty years ago, all could have 
been saved. Often In those old days, a Com- 
mander-in-Chief could pull a battle out of the 
fire and bring halted or broken troops to vic- 
tory. [Then, by waving a sword, and shouting 
a personal appeal, the resolute soul could pluck 
the hearts of his men forward in a rush that 
nothing could stem. So Wolfe took Quebec, so 
Desaix won Marengo, so Bonaparte swept the 
bridge at Lodi and won at Areola; so Cassar 
overcame the Nervil In the terrible day, and 
wrecked the Republic at Pharsalia. So Sher- 
man held the landing at Shiloh and Farragut 
pitted his iron heart against Iron ships at Fort 
Jackson. So Sir Ian Hamilton himself snatched 
victory from the hesitation at Elandslaagte. 
Then the Indlviduars will could take instant 
effect, but then the IndlviduaFs front was not a 
five mile front of wilderness, the men were un- 
der his hand, within sight and sound of him 
and not committed by order to another tactical 



198 GallipoU 

project. There, at Suvla, there was no chance 
for these heroic methods. Suvla was the mod- 
ern battle field, where nothing can be done 
quickly except the firing of a machine gun. On 
the modern field, especially on such a field as 
Suvla, where the troops were scattered In the 
wilderness, it may take several hours for an 
order to pass from one wing to the other. In 
this case it was not an order that was to pass, 
but a counter-order; the order had already 
gone, for an attack at dawn on the morrow. 

All soldiers seem agreed, that even with 
authority to back It, a counter-order, on a mod- 
ern battlefield, to urge forward halted troops, 
takes time to execute. Sir Ian Hamilton's de- 
termination to seize those hills could not spare 
the time ; too much time had already gone. He 
ordered an advance at all costs with whatever 
troops were not scattered, but only four bat- 
talions could be found in any way ready to 
move. It was now 5 P. M. : there were perhaps 
three more hours of light. The four battal- 
ions were ordered to advance at once to make 
good what they could of the hills fronting the 



GaUipoU 199 

bay before the 3[urks forestalled them. At 
dawn the general attack as already planned was 
to support them. Unfortunately the four bat- 
talions were less ready than was thought; they 
were not able to advance at once, nor for ten 
all-precious hours. They did not begin to ad- 
vance till 4 o'clock the next morning (the 9th 
of August) and even then the rest of the Divi- 
sion which was to support them was not In con- 
cert with them. They attacked the hills to the 
north of Anafarta Sagir, but they were now too 
late, the Turks were there before them. In great 
force, with their guns, and the thrust, which 
the day before could have been met by (at most) 
five Turk battalions without artillery was now 
parried and thwarted. Presently the Division 
attacked with great gallantry, over burning 
scrub, seized Ismail and was then checked and 
forced back to the Chocolate Hills. The left 
had failed. The main blow of the battle on 
Sari Bair was to have no support from Suvla. 
The main blow was given, none the less, by 
the troops near Chunuk. Three columns were 
formed in the pitchy blackness of the very early 



200 GalUpoli 

morning of the 9th, two to seize and clear 
Chunuk and Hill Q, the third to pass from Hill 
Q on the wave of the assault to the peak of 
Koja Chemen. The first two columns were on 
the lower slopes of Chunuk and in the fields 
about The Farm, with orders to attack at dawn. 
The third column consisting wholly of English 
troops was not yet on the ground, but moving 
during the night up the Chailak Dere. The 
Dere was jammed with pack-mules, ammuni- 
tion and wounded men; it was pitch dark and 
the column made bad going, and those leading 
it were doubtful of the way. Brigadier-Gen- 
eral Baldwin, who commanded, left his Brigade 
in the Dere, went to the Headquarters of the 
1st column, and brought back guides to lead his 
Brigade into position. The guides led him on 
in the darkness, till they realised that they were 
lost. The Brigadier marched his men back to 
the Chailak, and then, still in pitch darkness, 
up a nullah into the Aghyl Dere, and from 
there, in growing light, towards The Farm. 
This wandering in the darkness had tragical 
results. 



Gain poll 20 1 

At half-past four the guns from the ships and 
the army opened on Chunuk, and the columns 
moved to the assault. Soon the peaks of their 
objective were burning like the hills of hell to 
light them on their climb to death, and they 
went up in the half-darkness to the storm of 
a volcano spouting fire, driving the Turks be- 
fore them. Some of the Warwicks and South 
Lancashires were the first upon the top of 
Chunuk; Major Allanson, leading the 6th 
Gurkhas, was the first on the ridge between 
Chunuk and Hill Q. Up on the crests came 
the crowding sections; the Turks were break- 
ing and falling back. Our men passed over the 
crests and drove the Turks down on the other 
side. Victory was flooding up over Chunuk 
like the Severn tide : our men had scaled the 
scarp, and there below them lay the ditch, the 
long grey streak of the Hellespont, the victory 
and the reward of victory. The battle lay like 
a field ripe to the harvest, our men had but to 
put in the sickle. The Third Column was the 
sickle of that field, that Third Column which 
had lost its way in the blackness of the wilder- 



202 Gallipoli 

ness. Even now that Third Column was com- 
ing up the hill below; in a few minutes it 
would have been over the crest, going on to 
victory with the others. Then, at that moment 
of time, while our handful on the hilltop 
waited for the weight of the Third Column to 
make its thrust a death-blow, came the most 
tragical thing in all that tragical campaign. 

It was barely daylight when our men won 
the hilltop. The story is that our men moving 
on the crest were mistaken for Turks, or (as 
some think) that there was some difference in 
officers* watches, some few minutes' delay in be- 
ginning the fire of the guns, and therefore some 
few minutes' delay in stopping the bombard- 
ment, which had been ordered to continue upon 
the crest for three-quarters of an hour from 
4.30 A. M. Whatever the cause, whether ac- 
cident, fate, mistake, or the daily waste and 
confusion of battle, our own guns searched the 
hill-top for some minutes too long, and thinned 
out our brave handful with a terrible fire. They 
were caught in the open and destroyed there; 
the Turks charged back upon the remnant and 



Gallipoli 203 

beat them off the greater part of the crest. 
Only a few minutes after this the Third Column 
came into action in support : too late. 

[The Turks beat them down the hill to The 
Farm, but could not drive the men of the First 
Column from the southwestern half of the top 
of the Chunuk. All through the hard and 
bloody day of the 9th of August the Turks tried 
to carry this peak, but never quite could, though 
the day was one long succession of Turk at- 
tacks, the Turks fresh and in great strength, 
our men weary from three terrible days and 
nights and only a battalion strong, since the 
peak would not hold more. The New Zealand- 
ers and some of the 13th Division held that end 
of Chunuk. They were in trenches which had 
been dug under fire, partly by themselves, partly 
by the Turks. In most places these trenches 
were only scratchings in the ground, since 
neither side on that blazing and stricken hill 
could stand to dig. Here and there, in shel- 
tered patches, the trenches were three feet deep, 
but whether three feet deep or three inches, all 
were badly sited, and in some parts had only 



204 Gal lip oil 

ten yards field of fire. In these pans or scratch- 
ings our men fought all day, often hand to 
hand, usually under a pelt of every kind of 
fire, often amid a shower of bombs since the 
Turks could creep up under cover to within 
so few yards. Our men lost very heavily 
during the day but at nightfall we still held the 
peak. After dark the 6th Loyal North Lan- 
cashires relieved the garrison, took over the 
trenches, did what they could to strengthen 
them, and advanced them by some yards here 
and there. At four o'clock on the morning of 
the loth, the 5th Wiltshires came up to sup- 
port them and lay down behind the trenches in 
the ashes, sand and scattered rubble of the hill- 
top. Both battalions were exhausted from four 
days and nights of continual fighting, but in 
very good heart. At this time, these two bat- 
talions marked the extreme right of our new 
line ; on their left, stretching down to The Farm, 
were the loth Hampshlres, and near The Farm 
the remains of the Third Column under Gen- 
eral Baldwin. There may have been In all 
some five thousand men on Chunuk and within 



Gallipoli 205 

a quarter of a mile of it round The Farm. 
In the darkness before dawn when our men 
on the hill were busy digging themselves bet- 
ter cover for the day's battle, the Turks, now 
strongly reinforced from Bulair and Asia, as- 
saulted Chunuk with not less than 15,000 men. 
pThey came on in a monstrous mass, packed 
shoulder to shoulder, in some places eight deep, 
in others three or four deep. Practically all 
their first line were shot by our men, prac- 
tically all the second line were bayoneted, but 
the third line got into our trenches and over- 
whelmed the garrison. Our men fell back to 
the second line of trenches and rallied and fired, 
but the Turks overwhelmed that line too and 
then with their packed multitude they paused 
and gathered like a wave, burst down on the 
Wiltshire Regiment, and destroyed it almost 
to a man. Even so, the survivors, outnum- 
bered 40 to I, formed and charged with the 
bayonet, and formed and charged a second 
time, with a courage which makes the charge 
of the Light Brigade seem like a dream. But 
it was a hopeless position, the Turks came on 



2o6 Gallipoli 

like the sea, beat back all before them, paused 
for a moment, set rolling down the hill upon 
our men a number of enormous round bombs, 
which bounded into our lines and burst, and 
then following up this artillery they fell on the 
men round The Farm in the most bloody and 
desperate fight of the campaign. 

Even as they topped Chunuk and swarmed 
down to engulf our right, our guns opened upon 
them in a fire truly awful, but thousands came 
alive over the crest and went down to the bat- 
tle below. Stragglers running from the first 
rush put a panic in the Aghyl Dere, where bear- 
ers, doctors, mules and a multitude of wounded 
were jammed up with soldiers trying to get up 
to the fight. Some of our men held up against 
this thrust of the Turks, and in that first brave 
stand. General Baldwin was killed. Then our 
line broke, the Turks got fairly in among our 
men with a weight which bore all before it, 
and what followed was a long succession of 
British rallies to a tussle body to body, with 
knives and stones and teeth, a fight of wild 
beasts in the ruined cornfields of The Farm. 



Gallipoli 207 

Nothing can be said of that fight, no words can 
describe nor any mind imagine it, except as a 
roaring and blazing hour of killing. Our last 
reserves came up to it, and the Turks were 
beaten back; very few of their men reached 
their lines alive. The Turk dead lay in thou- 
sands all down the slopes of the hill; but the 
crest of the hill, the prize, remained in Turk 
hands, not in ours. 

That ended the battle of the 6th-ioth of 
August. We had beaten off the Turks, but our 
men were too much exhausted to do more. 
They could not go up the hill again. Our 
thrust at Sari Bair had failed. It had just 
failed, by a few minutes, though unsupported 
from the left. Even then, at the eleventh hour, 
two fresh battalions and a ton of water would 
have made Chunuk ours, but we had neither 
the men nor the water; Sari was not to be our 
hill. Our men fought for four days and nights 
in a wilderness of gorse and precipice to make 
her ours. They fought in a blazing sun, with- 
out rest, with little food and with almost no 
water, on hills on fire and on crags rotting to 



2o8 Gallipoli 

the tread. They went, like all their brothers 
In that Peninsula, on a forlorn hope, and by 
bloody pain they won the Image and the taste 
of victory, and then, when their reeling bodies 
had burst the bars, so that our race might pass 
through, there were none to pass, the door was 
open, but there were none to go through It to 
triumph, and then, slowly, as strength failed, 
the door was shut again, the bars were forged 
again, victory was hidden again, all was to do 
again, and our brave men were but the fewer 
and the bitterer for all their bloody sacrifice 
for the land they served. All was to do again 
after the loth of August, the great battle of 
the campaign was over. We had made our 
fight, we had seen our enemy beaten and the 
prize displayed, and then (as before at Helles) 
we had to stop for want of men, till the enemy 
had remade his army and rebuilt his fort. 



VI 



The day passed, the night came, the King lay down 
in his vaulted room. St. Gabriel came from God to 
call him. " Charles, summon the army of your empire 
and go by forced marches into the land of Bire, to the 
city that the pagans have besieged. The Christians 
call and cry for you." The Emperor wished not to go. 
" God," he said, ** how painful is my life." He wept 
from his eyes, he tore his white beard." 

The end of the Song of Roland. 



That, In a way, was the end of the campaign, 
for no other attempt to win through was made. 
The Turks were shaken to the heart. Another 
battle following at once might well have broken 
them. But we had not the men nor the shells 
for another battle. In the five days' battle 
on the front of twelve miles we had lost very 
little less than a quarter of our entire army, 
and we had shot away most of our always 
scanty supply of ammunition. We could not 
attack again till fifty thousand more men were 
landed and the store of shells replenished. 
Those men and shells were not near Galllpoll, 
but In England, where the war as a whole had 
to be considered. The question to be decided, 
by those directing the war as a whole, was, 
"should those men and shells be sent?" It 
was decided by the High Direction, that they 
should not be sent : the effort therefore could not 
be made. 

211 



212 Gallipoli 

Since the effort could not be made, the cam- 
paign declined into a secondary operation, to 
contain large reserves of Xurks, with their guns 
and munitions, from use elsewhere, in Meso- 
potamia or in the Caucasus. But before it be- 
came this, a well-planned and well-fought effort 
was made from Suvla to secure our position by- 
seizing the hills to the east of the Bay. This 
attack took place on the 21st August, in intense 
heat, across an open plain without cover of any 
kind, blazing throughout nearly all its length 
with scrub fires. The 29th Division (brought 
up from Cape Helles) carried Scimitar Hill 
with great dash, and was then held up. The 
attack on Ismail Oglu failed. Two thrusts 
made by the men of Anzac in the latter days 
of August, secured an important well, and the 
Turk stronghold of Hill 60. This last suc- 
cess made the line from Anzac to Suvla Im- 
pregnable. 

After this, since no big attempt could be made 
by the Allied Troops and no big attempt was 
made by the enemy, the fighting settled down 
into trench warfare on both sides. There was 



Gallipoli 213 

some shelling every day and night, some ma- 
chine gun and rifle lire, much sniping, great 
vigilance, and occasional bombing and mining. 
The dysentery, which had been present ever 
since the heats began, increased beyond all 
measure; very few men in all that army were 
not attacked and weakened by it. Many thou- 
sands went down with it; Mudros, Alexan- 
dria and Malta were filled with cases; many 
died. 

Those who remained, besides carrying on the 
war by daily and nightly fire, worked continu- 
ally with pick and shovel to improve the lines. 
Long after the war, the goatherd on Gallipoli 
will lose his way in the miles of trenches which 
zigzag from Cape Helles to Achi Baba and 
from Gaba Tepe to Ejelmer Bay. They run 
to and fro in all that expanse of land, some of 
them shallow, others deep cuttings In the marl, 
many of them paved with stone or faced with 
concrete, most of them sided with little caverns, 
leading far down (in a few cases) to rooms 
twenty feet under the ground. Long after we 
are all dust the goats of Gallipoli will break 



214 Gallipoli 

their legs in those pits and ditches, and over 
their coffee round the fire the elders will say 
that they were dug by devils and the sons of 
devils, and antiquarians will come from the 
west to dig there, and will bring away shards 
of iron, and empty tins and bones. Fifty years 
ago some French staff officers traced out the 
works round Durazzo, where Pompey the 
Great fought just such another campaign, two 
thousand years ago. Two thousand years 
hence, when this war is forgotten, those lines 
under the ground will draw the staff officers 
of whatever country is then the most cried for 
brains. 

Those lines were the homes of thousands of 
our soldiers for half a year and more. There 
they lived and did their cooking and washing, 
made their jokes and sang their songs. There 
they sweated under their burdens, and slept, and 
fell in to die. There they marched up the burn- 
ing hill, where the sand devils flung by the 
shells were blackening heaven, there they lay in 
their dirty rags awaiting death, and there by 



Gallipoli 215 

thousands up and down they lie buried, in little 
lonely graves where they fell, or in the pits of 
the great engagements. 

Those lines at Cape Helles, Anzac and 
Suvla, were once busy towns, thronged by thou- 
sands of citizens whose going and coming and 
daily labour were cheerful with singing, as 
though those places were mining camps during 
a gold rush, instead of a perilous front where 
the fire never ceased and the risk of death was 
constant. But for the noise of war, coming 
in an irregular rattle, with solitary big explo- 
sions, the screams of shells or the wild whistling 
crying of ricochets, they seemed busy but very 
peaceful places. At night, from the sea, the 
lamps of the dugouts on the cliffs were like the 
lights of seacoast towns in summer, and the 
places seemingly as peaceful, but for the pop 
and rattle of fire and the streaks of glare from 
the shells. There was always singing, some- 
times very good, and always beautiful, coming 
in the crash of war; and always one heard the 
noises of the work of men, the beat of pile- 



2i6 Gallipoli 

drivers, wheels going over stones, and the little 
solid pobbing noises, from bullets dropping in 
the sea. 

I have said that those positions were like 
mining camps during a gold rush. Ballarat, 
the Sacramento, and the camps of the Transvaal 
must have looked strangely like those camps at 
Suvla and Cape Helles. Anzac at night was 
like those crags of old building over the Arno 
at Florence ; by day it was a city of cliff dwellers, 
stirring memories of the race's past. An im- 
mense expanse was visible from all these places; 
at Cape Helles there was the plain rising grad- 
ually to Achi Baba, at Anzac a wilderness of 
hills, at Suvla the same hills seen from below. 
Over all these places came a strangeness of 
light, unlike anything to be seen in the west, a 
light which made the hills clear and unreal at 
the same time, softening their savagery into 
peace, till they seemed not hills but swellings of 
the land, as though the land there had breathed- 
in and risen a little. All the places were dust- 
coloured as soon as the flowers had withered, 
a dark dust-coloured where the scrub grew 



Gallipoli 217 

(often almost wine-dark like our own hills 
where heather grows) a pale sand colour, where 
the scrub gave out, and elsewhere a paleness 
and a greyness as of moss and lichen and old 
stone. On this sandy and dusty land, where 
even the trees were grey and ghostly (olive and 
Eastern currant) the camps were scattered, a 
little and a little, never much in one place on 
account of shelling, till the impression given was 
one of multitude. 

The signs of the occupation began far out at 
sea where the hospital ships lay waiting for 
their freight. There were always some there, 
painted white and green, lying outside the range 
of the big guns. Nearer to the shore were the 
wrecks of ships, some of them sunk by our men, 
to make breakwaters, some sunk by the Turk 
shells, some knocked to pieces or washed ashore 
by foul weather. Nearly all these wrecks were 
of small size, trawlers, drifters and little coast- 
wise vessels such as peddle and bring home fish 
on the English coasts. Closer in, right on the 
beaches, were the bones of still smaller boats, 
pinnaces, cutters and lighters, whose crews had 



2i8 Gallipoli / 

been the men of the first landings. Men could 
not see those wrecks without a thrill. There 
were piers at all the beaches, all built under 
shell fire, to stand both shell fire and the sea, 
and at the piers there was always much busy- 
life, men singing at their work, horses and mules 
disembarking, food and munitions and water 
discharging, wounded going home and drafts 
coming ashore. On the beaches were the hier- 
oglyphs of the whole bloody and splendid story; 
there were the marks and signs, which no one 
could mistake nor see unmoved. 

Even after months of our occupation the 
traces were there oii the main tracks. A man 
had but to step from one of the roads into the 
scrub, and there they lay, relics of barbed wire, 
blown aside in tangles, round shrapnel-bullets 
in the sand, empty cartridge-cases, clips of car- 
tridge cases bent double by a blow yet undis- 
charged, pieces of flattened rifle barrel, rags of 
leather, broken bayonets, jags and hacks of 
shell, and, in little hollows, little heaps of car- 
tridge-cases, where some man had lain to fire 
for hour after hour, often until he died at his 



Gallipoli 219 

post, on the 25th of April. Here, too, one 
came upon the graves of soldiers, sometimes 
alone, sometimes three or four together, each 
with an Inscribed cross and border of stones 
from the beach. Privates, sergeants and offi- 
cers lay In those graves and by them, all day 
long, the work which they had made possible 
by that sacrifice on the 25th, went on in a 
stream, men and munitions going up to the 
front, and wounded and the dying coming down, 
while the explosions of the cannon trembled 
through the earth to them and the bullets piped 
and fell over their heads. 

But the cities of those camps were not cities 
of the dead, they were cities of intense life, 
cities of comradeship and resolve, unlike the 
cities of peace. At Mudros, all things seemed 
little, for there men were dwarfed by their set- 
ting; they were there in ships which made even 
a full battalion seem only a cluster of heads. 
On the Peninsula they seemed to have come for 
the first time to full stature. There they were 
bigger than their surroundings. There they 
were naked manhood pitted against death in 



220 Gallipoli 

the desert and more than holding their own. 

All those sun-smitten hills and gullies, grow- 
ing nothing but crackling scrub, were peopled 
by crowds. On all the roads, on the plain, 
which lay white like salt in the glare, and on 
the sides of the gullies, strange, sunburned, 
half-naked men moved at their work with the 
bronze bodies of gods. Like Egyptians build- 
ing a city they passed and repassed with boxes 
from the walls of stores built on the beach. 
Dust had toned their uniforms even with the 
land. Their half-nakedness made them more 
grand than clad men. Very few of them were 
less than beautiful; whole battalions were mag- 
nificent, the very flower of the world's men. 
They had a look In their eyes which those who 
saw them will never forget. 

Sometimes as one watched, one heard a noise 
of cheering from the ships, and this, the herald 
of good news, passed inland, till men would 
rise from sleep in their dugouts, come to the 
door, blinking in the sun, to pass on the cheer. 
In some strange way the news, the cause of the 
cheering, passed inland with the cheer; a sub- 



Gallipoli 221 

marine had sunk a transport off Constantinople, 
or an aeroplane had bombed a powder factory. 
One heard the news pass on and on, till it rang 
from the front trenches ten yards from the Turk 
line. Sometimes the cheering was very loud, 
mingled with singing; then it was a new bat- 
talion, coming from England, giving thanks 
that they were there, after their months of train- 
ing, to help the fleet through. Men who heard 
those battalions singing will never hear those 
songs of " Tipperary," *' Let's all go down the 
Strand," or ** We'll all go the same way home," 
without a quickening at the heart. 

Everywhere in the three positions there were 
the homes of men. In gashes or clefts of the 
earth were long lines of mules or horses with 
Indian grooms. On the beaches were offices, 
with typewriters clicking and telephone bells 
ringing. Stacked on one side were ammuni- 
tion carts so covered with bushes that they 
looked like the scrub they stood on. Here and 
there were strangely painted guns, and every- 
where the work of men, armourer's forges, far- 
rier's anvils, the noise and clink and bustle of 



222 Gallipoli 

a multitude. Everywhere, too, but especially 
in the gullies were the cave-dwellings of the dug- 
outs, which so dotted the cliffs with their doors, 
that one seemed put back to Cro-Magnon or 
Xampa, into some swarming tribe of cave- 
dwellers. All the dugouts were different, 
though all were built upon the same principle, 
first a scooping in the earth, then a raised earth 
ledge for a bed, then (if one were lucky) a cor- 
rugated-iron roof propped by balks, lastly a 
topping of sandbags strewn with scrub. For 
doors, if one had a door or sunshade, men used 
sacking, burlap, a bit of canvas, or a blanket. 
Then, when the work was finished, the builder 
entered in, to bathe in his quarter of a pint of 
water, smoke his pipe, greet his comrades, and 
think foul scorn of the Turk, whose bullets 
piped and droned overhead, all day and night, 
like the little finches of home. Looking out 
from the upper dugouts one saw the dusty, 
swarming warren of men, going and coming, 
with a kind of swift slouch, carrying boxes from 
the beach. Mules and men passed, songs went 
up and down the gullies, and were taken up by 



Gallipoli 223 

those at rest, men washed and mended clothes, 
or wandered naked and sun reddened along 
the beach, bathing among dropping bullets. 
Wounded men came down on stretchers, sick 
men babbled in pain or cursed the flies, the 
forges clinked, the pile drivers beat in the balks 
of the piers, the bullets droned and piped, or 
rushed savagely, or popped into a sandbag. 
Up in the trenches the rifles made the irregular 
snaps of fire-crackers, sometimes almost ceas- 
ing, then popping, then running along a section 
In a rattle, then quickening down the line and 
drawing the enemy, then pausing and slowly 
ceasing and beginning again. From time to 
time, with a whistle and a walling, some Asian 
shell came over and dropped and seemed to 
multiply, and gathered to herself the shriek of 
all the devils of hell, and burst like a devil and 
filled a great space with blackness and dust and 
falling fragments. Then another and another 
came, almost In the same place, till the gunners 
had had enough. Then the dust settled, the 
ruin was made good, and all went on as before, 
men carrying and tolling and singing, bullets 



224 Gallipoli 

piping, and the flies settling and swarming on 
whatever was obscene in what the shell had 
scattered. 

Everywhere in those positions there was 
gaiety and courage and devoted brotherhood, 
but there was also another thing, which brooded 
over all, and struck right home to the heart. 
It was a tragical feeling, a taint or flavour in 
the mind, such as men often feel in hospitals 
when many are dying, the sense that Death was 
at work there, that Death lived there, that 
Death wandered up and down there and fed 
on Life. 

Since the main object of the campaign, to 
help the fleet through the Narrows, had been 
abandoned (in mid-August), and no further 
thrust was to be made against the Turks, the 
questions " Were our 100,000 men in Gallipoli 
containing a sufficiently large army of Turks 
to justify their continuance on the Peninsula? '' 
and *' Could they be more profitably used else- 
where? " arose in the minds of the High Direc- 
tion from week to week as the war changed. 



Gallipoli 225 

In the early autumn, when the Central Powers 
combined with Bulgaria to crush Serbia and 
open a road to Constantinople, these questions 
became acute. During October owing to the 
radical change in the Balkan situation which 
was produced by the treachery of Bulgaria and 
the bewildering indecision of Greece the ad- 
vantage of our continuing the campaign be- 
came more and more doubtful and in Novem- 
ber, after full consideration, it was decided to 
evacuate the Peninsula. Preparations were 
made and the work begun. 

Late in November, something happened 
which had perhaps some influence in hurrying 
on the date of the evacuation. This was the 
blizzard of the 26th-2 8th, which lost us about 
a tenth of our whole army from cold, frostbite, 
exposure, and the sicknesses which follow them. 
The 26th began as a cold, dour GalllpoH day 
with a bitter northeasterly wind, which in- 
creased in the afternoon to a fresh gale, with 
sleet. Later, It Increased still more, and blew 
hard, with thunder; and with the thunder came 
a rain more violent than any man of our army 



226] Gallipoli 

had ever seen. Water pours off very quickly 
from that land of abrupt slopes. In a few 
minutes every gully was a raging torrent, and 
every trench a river. By an ill-chance this 
storm fell with cruel violence upon the ever 
famous 29th Division then holding trenches at 
Suvla. The water poured down into their 
trenches, as though It were a tidal wave. It 
came In with a rush, with a head upon it like 
the tide advancing, so quickly that men were one 
minute dry and the next moment drowned at 
their posts. They were caught so suddenly that 
those who escaped had to leap from their 
trenches for dear life, leaving coats, haver- 
sacks, food and sometimes even their rifles, be- 
hind them. 

Our trenches were in nearly every case be- 
low those of the Turks, who therefore suffered 
from the water far less than our men did. 
The Turks saw our men leaping from their 
trenches, and either guessing the reason or fear- 
ing an attack, opened a very heavy rifle and 
shrapnel fire upon them. Our men had to 
shelter behind the parados of their trenches, 



Gallipoli 227 

where they scraped themselves shallow pans in 
the mud under a heavy fire. At dark the sleet 
Increased, the mud froze, and there our men 
lay, most of them without overcoats, and many 
of them without food. In one trench when 
the flood rose, a pony, a mule, a pig, and two 
dead Turks were washed over a barricade 
together. 

Before the night fell, many of our men were 
frost-bitten and started limping to the ambu- 
lances, under continual shrapnel fire and In 
blinding sleet. A good many fell down by the 
way and were frozen to death. [The gale In- 
creased slowly all through the night, blowing 
hard and steadily from the north, making a 
great sea upon the coast, and driving the spray 
far inland. At dawn It grew colder, and the 
sleet hardened Into snow, with an ever-increas- 
ing wind, which struck through our men to the 
marrow. " They fell 111," said one who was 
there, " In heaps." The water from the flood 
had fallen In the night, but It was still four 
feet deep In many of the trenches, and our men 
passed the morning under fire in their shelter 



228 Gallipoli 

pans, fishing for food and rifles in their drowned 
lines. All through the day the wind gathered, 
till it was blowing a full gale, vicious and bitter 
cold ; and on the 28th it reached its worst. The 
28th was spoken of afterwards as " Frozen 
Foot Day;" it was a day more terrible than 
any battle; but now it was taking toll of the 
Turks, and the fire slackened. Probably either 
side could have had the other's position for the 
taking on the 28th, had there been enough un- 
frosted feet to advance. It was a day so blind 
with snow and driving storm that neither side 
could see to fire, and this brought the advan- 
tage, that our men hopping to the ambulances 
had not to go through a pelt of shrapnel bul- 
lets. On the 29th, the limits of human strength 
were reached. Some of those frozen three 
days before were able to return to duty, and 
" a great number of oflUcers and men who had 
done their best to stick it out were forced to go 
to hospital." The water fell during this day, 
but it left on an average 2^ feet of thick, 
slushy mud, into which many trenches collapsed. 
After this the weather was fine and warm. 



Gallipoli 229 

At Helles and Anzac the fall of the ground 
gave some protection from this gale, but at 
Suvla there was none. When the weather 
cleared, the beaches were heaped with the 
wreck of piers, piles, boats and lighters, all 
broken and jammed together. But great as 
this wreck was the wreck of men was even 
greater. The 29th Division had lost two- 
thirds of its strength. In the three sectors 
over 200 meri w^re dead, over 10,000 were 
unfit for further service and not less than 
30,000 others were sickened and made old by 
it. 

The Turk loss was much more serious even 
than this, for though they suffered less from 
the wet, they suffered more from the cold, 
through being on the higher ground. The 
snow lay upon their trenches long after it had 
gone from ours, and the Turk equipment though 
very good as far as it went, was only good for 
the summer. Their men wore thin clothes, 
and many of them had neither overcoat nor 
blanket. The blizzard which was a discourage- 
ment to us, took nearly all the heart out of the 



230 Gal lip oil 

Turks ; and this fact must be borne in mind in 
the reading of the next few pages. 

The gale had one good effect. Either the 
cold or the rain destroyed or removed the cause 
of the dysentery, which had taken nearly a 
thousand victims a day for some months. The 
disease stopped at once and no more fresh 
cases were reported. 

This storm made any attempt to land or to 
leave the land impossible for four days to- 
gether. Coming, as it did, upon the decision 
to evacuate, it gave the prompting, that the 
evacuation should be hurried, lest such weather 
should prevent it. On the 8th of December, 
the evacuation of Anzac and Suvla was ordered 
to begin. 

It was not an easy task to remove large 
numbers of men, guns and animals from posi- 
tions commanded by the Turk observers and 
open to every cruising aeroplane. But by ruse 
and skill, and the use of the dark, favoured by 
fine weather, the work was done, almost with- 
out loss, and, as far as one could judge, unsus- 
pected. 



Gallipoli 23 1 

German agents, eager to discredit those 
whom they could not defeat, have said, ** that 
we bribed the Turks to let us go; " next year 
perhaps they will say " that the Turks bribed 
us to go;" the year after that perhaps, they 
will invent something equally false and even 
sillier. But putting aside the foulness and the 
folly of this bribery lie, it is interesting to 
enquire how it happened that the Turks did not 
attack our men while they were embarking. 

The Turks were very good fighters, furious 
in attack and resolute in defence, but among 
their qualities of mind were some which greatly 
puzzled our commanders. Their minds would 
sometimes work in ways very strange to 
Europeans. They did, or refrained from 
doing, certain things in ways for which neither 
we nor our Allies could account. Some day, 
long hence, when the war is over, the Turk 
story of our withdrawal will be made known. 
Until then, we can only guess, why it was that 
the embarkation, which many had thought 
would lose us half our army, was made good 
from Anzac and Suvla with the loss of only 



232 Gallipoli 

four or five men (or less than the normal loss 
of a night in the trenches) . Only two explana- 
tions are possible. Either (i) the Turks 
knew that we were going and wanted to be rid 
of us, or (2) they did not know that we were 
going and were entirely deceived by our ruses. 
Had they known that we were going from 
Anzac and Suvla, it is at least likely that they 
would have hastened our going, partly that 
they might win some booty, which they much 
needed, or take a large number of prisoners, 
whose appearance would have greatly cheered 
the citizens of Constantinople. But nearly all 
those of our army who were there, felt, both 
from observation and intelligence, that the 
Turks did not know that we were going. As 
far as men on one side in a war can judge of 
their enemies they felt that the Turks were 
deceived, completely deceived, by the ruses em- 
ployed by us, and that they believed that we 
were being strongly reinforced for a new at- 
tack. Our soldiers took great pains to make 
them believe this. Looking down upon us 
from their heights, the Turks saw boats leaving 



Gallipoli 233 

the shore apparently empty, and returning, 
apparently, full of soldiers. Looking up at 
them, from our position our men saw how the 
sight affected them. For the twelve days dur- 
ing which the evacuation was in progress at 
Anzac and Suvla, the Turks were plainly to be 
seen, digging everywhere to secure themselves 
from the feared attack. They dug new lines, 
they brought up new guns, they made ready 
for us in every way. On the night of the 19th- 
20th December, in hazy weather, at full moon, 
our men left Suvla and Anzac, unmolested. 

It was said by Dr. Johnson that *' no man 
does anything, consciously for the last time, 
without a feeling of sadness." No man of all 
that force passed down those trenches, the 
scenes of so much misery and pain and joy and 
valour and devoted brotherhood, without a 
deep feeling of sadness. Even those who had 
been loudest in their joy at going were sad. 
Many there did not want to go ; but felt that it 
was better to stay, and that then, with another 
fifty thousand men, the task could be done, and 
their bodies and their blood buy victory for us. 



234 Gallipoli 

This was the feeling even at Suvla, where the 
men were shaken and sick still from the storm ; 
but at Anzac, the friendly little kindly city, 
which had been won at such cost in the ever- 
glorious charge of the 28th, and held since with 
such pain, and built with such sweat and toil 
and anguish, in thirst, and weakness and bodily 
suffering, which had seen the thousands of the 
13th Division land in the dark and hide, and 
had seen them fall in with the others to go to 
Chunuk, and had known all the hope and fer- 
vour, all the glorious resolve, and all the bitter- 
ness and disappointment of the unhelped at- 
tempt, the feeling was far deeper. Officers and 
men went up and down the well-known gullies 
moved almost to tears by the thought that the 
next day those narrow acres so hardly won and 
all those graves of our people so long defended 
would be in Turk hands. 

For some weeks, our men had accustomed 
the Turks to sudden cessations of fire for half- 
an-hour or more. At first, the Turks had been 
made suspicious by these silences, but they were 
now used to them, and perhaps glad of them. 



GalUpoli 235 

They were not made suspicious by the slacken- 
ing of the fire on the night of the withdrawal. 
The mules and guns had all gone from Suvla. 
A few mules and a few destroyed guns were left 
at Anzac; in both places a pile of stores was 
left, all soaked in oil and ready for firing. The 
ships of war drew near to the coast, and trained 
their guns on the hills. In the haze of the 
full moon the men filed off from the trenches 
down to the beaches and passed away from 
Gallipoli, from the unhelped attempt which 
they had given their bodies and their blood to 
make. They had lost no honour. They were 
not to blame, that they were creeping off in 
the dark, like thieves in the night. Had others 
(not of their profession) many hundreds of 
miles away, but seen as they, as generous, as 
wise, as forseeing, as full of sacrifice, those 
thinned companies with the looks of pain in 
their faces, and the mud of the hills thick upon 
their bodies, would have given thanks in Santa 
Sophia three months before. They had failed 
to take Gallipoli, and the mine fields still 
barred the Hellespont, but they had fought a 



236 GaUipoli 

battle such as has never been seen upon this 
earth. What they had done will become a 
glory forever, wherever the deeds of heroic 
unhelped men are honoured and pitied and 
understood. They went up at the call of duty, 
with a bright banner of a battle-cry, against an 
impregnable fort. Without guns, without 
munitions, without help and without drink they 
climbed the scarp and held it by their own 
glorious manhood, quickened by a word from 
their chief. Now they were giving back the 
scarp and going out into new adventures, wher- 
ever the war might turn. 

Those going down to the beaches wondered 
in a kind of awe whether the Turks would dis- 
cover them and attack. The minutes passed, 
and boat after boat left the shore, but no attack 
came. The arranged rifles fired mechanically 
in the outer trenches at long intervals, and the 
crackle of the Turk reply followed. At Anzac, 
a rearguard of honour had been formed. The 
last two hundred men to leave Anzac were sur- 
vivors of those who had landed in the first 
charge, so glorious and so full of hope on the 



Gallipoli 237 

25th of April. They had fought through the 
whole campaign from the very beginning; they 
had seen it all. It was only just that they 
should be the last to leave. As they, too, 
moved down, one of their number saw a soli- 
tary Turk, black against the sky, hard at work 
upon his trench. That was the last enemy to 
be seen from Anzac. 

At half-past five in the winter morning of the 
20th December the last boat pushed off; and 
the last of our men had gone from Suvla and 
Anzac. Those who had been there from the 
first were deeply touched. There was a long- 
ing that it might be to do again, with the same 
com.rades, under the same chiefs but with better 
luck and better backing. Some distance from 
the shore the boats paused to watch the last 
act in the withdrawal. It was dead calm 
weather, with just that ruffle of wind which 
comes before the morning. The Turk fire 
crackled along the lines as usual, but the with- 
drawal was still not suspected. Then from the 
beaches within the stacks of abandoned stores 
came the noise of explosion, the charges had 



238' Gallipoli 

been fired, and soon Immense flames were lick- 
ing up those boxes and reddening the hills. As 
the flames grew, there came a stir In the Turk 
lines, and then every Turk gun that could be 
brought to bear opened with shrapnel and high 
explosive on the area of the bonfires. It was 
plain that the Turks misread the signs. They 
thought that some lucky shell had fired our 
stores and that they could stop us from putting 
out the flames. Helped by the blasts of many 
shells the burning rose like balefire, crowned by 
wreaths and streaks and spouts of flame. The 
stores were either ashes, or In a blaze which 
none could quench before the Turks guessed 
the meaning of that burning. Long before the 
fires had died and before the Turks were 
wandering In joy among our trenches, our men 
were aboard their ships standing over to 
Mudros. 

Some have said, " Even If the Turks were 
deceived at Anzac and Suvla, they must have 
known that you were leaving Cape Helles. 
Why did they not attack you while you were 
embarking there? " I do not know the answer 



Gallipoli 239 

to this question. But it Is possible that they 
did not know that we were leaving. It Is pos- 
sible that they believed that we should hold 
Cape Helles like an Eastern Gibraltar. It Is 
possible, on the other hand, that they were de- 
ceived again by our ruses. It is however, 
certain that they watched us far more narrowly 
at Cape Helles after the Anzac evacuation. 
Aeroplanes cruised over our position fre- 
quently, and shell-fire increased and became 
very heavy. Still, when the time came, the 
burning of our stores, after our men had em- 
barked, seemed to be the first warning that the 
Turks had that we were going. 

This was a mystery to our soldiers at the 
time and seems strange now. It is possible that 
at Cape Helles, the Turks' shaken, frozen and 
out-of-heart soldiers may have known that we 
were going yet had no life left In them for an 
attack. Many things are possible in this 
world, and the darkness is strange and the 
heart of a fellow-man is darkness to us. There 
were things In the Turk heart very dark indeed 
to those who tried to read it. The storm had 



240 GaUipoU 

dealt with them cruelly, that is all that we know. 
Let us wait till we know their story. 

The Cape Helles position was held for 
twenty days, after we had left Anzac and Suvla. 
On the 8th-9th of January in the present year, 
It was abandoned, with slight loss, though In 
breaking weather. By 4 o'clock on the morn- 
ing of the 9th of January, the last man had 
passed the graves of those who had won the 
beaches. They climbed on board their boats 
and pushed off. [They had said good-bye to 
the English dead, whose blood had given them 
those acres, now being given back. Some felt, 
as they passed those graves, that the stones 
were living men, who cast a long look after 
them when they had passed, and sighed, and 
turned landward as they had turned of old. 
Then in a rising sea, whipped with spray, 
among the noise of ships weltering to the rails, 
the battalions left Cape Helles; the River Clyde 
dimmed into the gale and became a memory, 
and the Gallipoli campaign was over. 

Many people have asked me, what the cam- 



GaUipoli 241 

paign achieved? It achieved much. It de- 
stroyed and put out of action many more of 
the enemy than of our own men. Our own 
losses in killed, wounded and missing were, 
roughly speaking, one hundred and fifteen 
thousand men, and the sick about one hundred 
thousand more, or (in all) more than two and 
one-half times as many as the army which made 
the landing. The Turk losses from all causes 
were far greater; they had men to waste and 
wasted them, like water, at Cape Helles, Lone 
Pine and Chunuk. The real Turk losses will 
never be tabled and pubHshed, but at the five 
battles of The Landings, the 6th May, the 4th 
June, the 28th of June, and the 6th-ioth Au- 
gust, they lost In counted killed alone, very 
nearly as many as were killed on our side in the 
whole campaign. Then, though we did not do 
what we hoped to do, our presence In Gallipoli 
contained large armies of Turks In and near the 
Peninsula. They had always from 15 to 20,- 
000 more men than we had, on the Peninsula 
itself, and at least as many more, ready to 
move, on the Asian shore and at Rodosto. In 



242 GaUipoU 

all, we disabled, or held from action elsewhere, 
not less than 400,000 Turks, that Is, a very 
large army of men who might have been used 
elsewhere, with disastrous advantage, in the 
Caucasus, when Russia was hard pressed, or, 
as they were used later. In Mesopotamia. 

So much for the soldiers' side; but politically, 
the campaign achieved much. In the begin- 
ning, it had a profound effect upon Italy; it 
was, perhaps, one of the causes which brought 
Italy Into her war with Austria. In the begin- 
ning, too. It had a profound effect upon the 
Balkan States. Bulgaria made no move against 
us until five months after our landings. Had 
we not gone to Galllpoll she would have joined 
our enemies In the late spring instead of In the 
middle autumn. 

Some of our enemies have said that *' the 
campaign was a defeat for the British Navy." 
It Is true that we lost two capital ships, from 
mines. In the early part of the campaign, and I 
think, in all, two others, from torpedoes, dur- 
ing the campaign. Such loss is not very serious 
In eleven months of naval war. For the cam- 



Gallipoli 243 

paign was a naval war, it depended utterly and 
solely upon the power of the Navy. By our 
Navy we went there and were kept there, and 
by our Navy we came away. During the nine 
months of our hold on the Peninsula over three 
hundred thousand men were brought by the 
Navy from places three, four, or even six thou- 
sand miles away. During the operations some 
half of these were removed by our Navy, as 
sick and wounded, to ports from eight hundred 
to three thousand miles away. Every day, for 
eleven months, ships of our Navy moved up 
and down the Gallipoli coast bombarding the 
Turk positions. Every day during the opera- 
tions our Navy kept our armies in food, drink 
and supplies. Every day, in all that time, if 
weather permitted, ships of our Navy cruised 
in the Narrows and off Constantinople, and the 
seaplanes of our Navy raided and scouted 
within the Turk lines. If there had been, I 
will not say, any defeat of, but any check to 
the Navy, we could not have begun the cam- 
paign or continued it. Every moment of those 
eleven months of war was an illustration of 



244 Gallipoli 

the silent and unceasing victory of our Navy's 
power. As Sir Ian Hamilton has put it " the 
Navy was our father and our mother." 

" Still," our enemies say, *' you did not win 
the Peninsula." We did not; and some day, 
when truth will walk clear-eyed, it will be known 
why we did not. Until then, let our enemies 
say this: "They did not win, but they came 
across three thousand miles of sea, a little army 
without reserves and short of munitions, a 
band of brothers, not half of them half-trained, 
and nearly all of them new to w^ar. They 
came to what we said was an impregnable fort 
on which our veterans of war and massacre had 
laboured for two months, and by sheer naked 
manhood they beat us, and drove us out of it. 
Then rallying, but without reserves, they beat 
us again and drove us further. Then rallying 
once more, but still without reserves, they beat 
us again, this time to our knees. Then, had 
they had reserves, they would have conquered, 
but by God's pity they had none. Then, after 
a lapse of time, when we were men again, they 
had reserves, and they hit us a staggering blow. 



Gallipoli 245 

which needed but a push to end us, but God 
again had pity. After that our God was in- 
deed pitiful, for England made no further 
thrust, and they went away." 

Even so was wisdom proven blind, 
So courage failed, so strength was chained, 
Even so the gods, whose seeing mind 
Is not as ours, ordained. 

Lollingdon, 

June 29, 1916. 



THE END 



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Sir Qidller-Coiich, Cambridge Utiiversity. 

A Mainsail Haul 

C/o^h, i2mo, $1.2^. Leather, $/.6o 

As a sailor before the mast Masefield has traveled the world over. 
Many of the tales in this volume are his own experiences written 
with the same dramatic fidelity displayed in " Dauber." 

The Tragedy of Pompey 

C/oth, i2mo, $/.2j. Leather, $i.6o 

A play such as only the author of "Nan" could have written. 
Tense in situation and impressive in its poetry it conveys Mase- 
field's genius in the handling of the dramatic form. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

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